


7000 Days - Part II

by Livia_LeRynn, Pangaea



Series: 7000 Days [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Abuse, Background Femslash, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Chemical abortion, Drug and Alcohol Use, F/F, Female-Centric, Forced Marriage, Furiosa POV, Gen, Herbal abortion, Human Trafficking, Illnesses, Implied Cannibalism, Life at the Citadel, Menstration, Miscarriage, Miss Giddy POV chapter, Miss Giddy's library, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Not-so-implied cannibalism, Older Characters, Origin Story, Panic Attacks, Post-apocalyptic religio-cultural evolution, Pre-Canon, Pregnancy, Suicide, Torture, Trauma, Violent Fantasies, Vomiting, Wasteland Mythology, Whump, Wife Furiosa, Worldbuilding, Yay feminism, canon-typical rape/non-con, drug assault, implied rape, old lady swagger, pop culture references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 09:17:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 27
Words: 55,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7309189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livia_LeRynn/pseuds/Livia_LeRynn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pangaea/pseuds/Pangaea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a story about women saving each other by helping each other survive.  <br/>Stolen from her homeland, Furiosa must learn to survive as a captive wife of Immortan Joe.  Her dreams of home will stay just that unless she can apply the lessons of her Mothers and learn to bond with her new teacher and fellow wives.  <br/>Note: while sexual assault is obviously a theme of this work, all mentions of it are kept vague and focused on its impact on its victims.  The intent of the work is show how Furiosa developed as a person during and as a result of her captivity and escape attempts. This fic is primarily gen.  M rating is primarily for violence.  F/F tag is primarily for Furiosa's mothers' romantic relationship in flashbacks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Fouth Day

**II **: Her Agonising Captivity****

# 

_She crossed the wasteland for a day, a night, and a morning,_  
_Following the sun, riding the eternal hum._  
_Even the drivers among us are passengers of fate;_  
_Even the drivers among us are passengers on the Fury Road._

### The Fouth Day

West, always west – the menagerie of vehicles chased down the afternoon sun until it tucked itself in for the night, and then they kept going. Dunes turned to jagged rock faces and dry, aching mountains before turning to hardpan that stretched in all directions in suffocating emptiness. Nothing was familiar, nothing the whole way. 

No one seemed to care if Furiosa saw where they were going. That must have meant that they thought she was too far from anything familiar for her view to be useful, which was probably true. West - west was all she knew.

Now they followed the lopsided moon. It seemed to appropriately match the white, contorting faces of her new set of captors. They made it certain that sleep was not an option for her – not that they bothered her directly. No, they made sure she was secure, not nocking herself against anything, almost like she was a fragile jug holding wine for the winter. Instead, they passed the time by hooting and hollering to each other, sometimes singing rowdy songs out the windows to their teammates below. White, hollowed out faces moved in the moonlight as they clamoured about the biggest vehicle the girl had ever seen.

"The Skull Tribe," that’s what she had heard in frantic whispers as they walked her from the tent to their vehicle. It seemed fitting - even more considering that they were the only other living things around. Perhaps that’s how they stayed alive, like prey animals playing dead, living things that tried to camouflage themselves in death so Death would pass them over.

Furiosa hadn't seen any plants or animals since she'd been taken. Rocks grew instead of trees here. So this was what the Goddess did to her ravished lands when she became The Destroying Mother Sekhmet, breathing fire and destruction over them. She couldn't blame her. Blood bloomed from flesh like desert flowers, brilliant in the dust. Her own rage was fire in her belly, trapped, smouldering in her flesh. 

As the sun rose on the fourth day, her thoughts turned to her home. She wondered if anyone had gone looking. How long had it taken her people to rouse themselves from their post-celebration hazes to discover that two of their own had just disappeared? Would anyone think they'd left willingly? Even refugees like Pala seldom left. Did the winds cover their tracks? Was there still blood in the sand? 

In the long light of morning she thought she saw a few small, stubborn bushes, the kind only goats ate, brown, dusty, thorny. She figured they were safe, being so far from anything else. They tucked themselves against the rugged hillside, blanketed by a light layer of sand. The way the hard pan was softening, she didn't expect to see any more for a while. Just like the Mothers had always said, everything was turning to dust.

### 

She must have drifted to seep at some point. The light way full when a hand gently roused her. She recognized its owner immediately even though to her eyes all the pale faces looked confusingly similar. “We’re almost there – you’ll want to see it,” said the one she’d named Reaper. He'd been good to since he's walked her from the tent - given her food and water, made a little nest for her in second seat from the back.

“See what?” Furiosa asked.

“Home.” There was a light in his voice and in his face. She’d always known death to smile but not like this. 

He touched her head then as one might touch the first born lamb of the season. His fingers lingered by her temple, and she couldn’t help pulling away. He touched her again, smoothing down her hair, leaving powder on the curls she’d inherited from her mother. 

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I won’t hurt you; I’ve just never seen anything so pretty, at least not up close.” 

She said nothing. She looked away in what he probably thought was modesty or shyness but was really just a girl wanting to be dust. He grabbed her wrist and tugged at it to remind her he had something to show her. She didn’t care to see his home; she didn’t care to see any home that wasn’t hers. 

“Please. It’s beautiful. I promise.”

She curled her legs to her chest. She didn't care. She could see all she needed out the window beside her. Nothing could be beautiful anymore. 

Reaper crouched down beside her again. “That woman I shot, she was important to you?”

Furiosa nodded, still turned away. 

“You should be happy for her,” he said slowly. “She had a good death. I know you miss her, and that's good too. It's good to have been known, good to be missed.”

She looked up into his pale face and noticed where his own tan skin showed through smears in his white covering. The black around his mouth and eyes blurred to grey at the edges. His eyes were dark and sad.

“You know nothing!” she spat at him before burying her face in her knees. 

“I'm just a delivery boy, so you're probably right, except for one thing – nothing makes everything feel right again like the sight of green.”

She perked up at the word. “Green?”

“You'd think it just a thirst vision, but it's as real as you and me.”

Truth be told, she wasn't entirely convinced he was real. Somewhere inside of her a little hope burned ardently that maybe, just maybe, she was dreaming. Green out here was the most reassuring idea she'd found yet, even more so than men who looked like skeletons and bushes that hid in the dust. 

“Alright,” she agreed because what harm could it do to look?

She followed him to the front of the vehicle, past seats with cushions of torn leather and fragile looking windows, past their assorted cargo of burlap sacs and wooden crates. Reaper ran his fingers over the backs of the seats as he hurried to the front. She did the same, finding some strange solace in cracks in the upholstery.

“Look,” he murmured as they approached the front windshield. He ushered her down a few steps so she was standing next to the driver and whispered, “Home.”

Buttes rose like towers of stone from the landscape in splendid isolation. On the front of the tallest the beginnings of a carved face stared out: a skull like the ones decorating the vehicle. And on top of its head, the skull wore a wreath of greenery in brilliant contrast to everything around it. She gasped at the sight. Life was growing from death as it always had and always would.

“Lovely, right?” asked Reaper before sliding open a window on the passenger side and firing a series of flares into the sky. “So you’ll be expected,” he explained. “It's not every day we bring home a queen.”

She kept staring at the greenery with her mouth slightly open. How could so much life thrive here, where Sekhmet’s breath had been hottest and most full of rage? How could anywhere be green other than her green place, other than her home where Sekmet’s rage was soothed? But here she was, a prisoner of a kind skeleton man who called her a queen; here she was watching green grow from dead stone.

As they moved closer she saw the ground around the buttes start to move. At first she thought it an earthquake until the surging land lifted wild hands and opened wailing mouths. She had never seen so many people all in one place. Thousands of dirty hands reached for the windows. Some especially determined fists even shook the ancient window panes in their frames. She staggered back, started by their desperate and hollow faces. 

One of the skull men lobbed potatoes from an open window as he shouted at the crowd. “Fuck off!”

The people dove for the potatoes rolling between their dust caked feet, chasing them as their irregular forms rolled unpredictably. One potato smacked a man in the forehead. He listed, dazed, while someone else pounced on his lost prize. When he realised what had happened, he flew into a blind rage, punching and kicking everyone within his reach.

“If you wouldn't feed them…” muttered a different skull man. “More and more of ‘em every day.”

“Gotta clear the way,” the first responded. 

By now Furiosa had hidden her face beneath the dashboard. These people were clearly starving, but the green… the green plants covering the top of the butte just behind them… Was it too young to harvest? It was just the new year after all.

She looked up again when she felt the ground start to lift beneath them. Sure enough, another skull man stood in front of the vehicle with a lever as the vehicle with all its passengers effortlessly scaled the rock face. They finally stopped before an open door teaming with white bodies like a mouthful of crooked teeth. 

Reaper offered her a hand to help her climb down, but she refused. She scrambled out and turned to face the expanse of open land behind her. Golden desert stretched before her until it met the brilliant sky at the long, flat horizon.

"Psst, the view is just as shine back here," said Reaper. "We gotta send the platform back down for the other cars."

She obeyed and watched with the lackadaisical wonder of a person convinced she's lost in a fever dream while the platform lowered from view. "How does it work?" 

"Wheel Rats walk, turn the big wheel, and the platform raises." 

“Rats?” she asked. She imagined an army of furry brown forms and pink feet.

"Yeah, Wheel Rats."

She had assumed a pulley and lever system like the kind sometimes used to bring water jugs to roofs for storage, but she couldn't imagine the strength required to lift a single car so high, let alone this massive vehicle. If these trained rats were walking on a wheel, there still must have been a pulley somewhere, but what kept the platform from listing and tipping?

"Amazing, yes?" asked a voice, a female voice behind her interrupting her thoughts.

She spun around to find the biggest surprise yet: a woman. An old, probably as old as Grandmother Fang, woman with a small face and a pert nose had emerged from the doorway. 

"Welcome," she said with a smile as she held out her hands to the hesitant girl. "You can call me Nanny. You must be starving. Don't worry, as soon as we get upstairs, we'll fix that."

"Where is this place?" Furiosa asked, her eyes wandering up the rock.

"Home. Heaven on earth. Paradise."

"I mean on a map."

“I'll have to find one for you.” The woman slipped her arm around the back of the girl’s shoulders and started to walk, “I'll look while you’re eating.” The girl pulled back from her touch. “Oh, I'm sorry – I didn't notice that cut there.”

Furiosa had forgotten about it until the woman’s touch sent jolts of hot pain through her flesh. She knew the idea that there was no pain in dreams was a lie, but what about infections?

"But don't worry, we'll get you all cleaned up,” Nanny promised as they stepped over the threshold, “Just as soon as we get you fed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The War Boys are driving the War Bus, which was once a city bus. It is the type that does not have an emergency exit at the rear of the bus.


	2. The Fourth Day: Part 2

_She arrived at the Palace of the Dead,_  
_From which Death stared across the land,_  
_And watched his prey, counting their days,_  
_Until their blood would quench his thirst,_  
_Until their bones would fertilise his garden._

### The Fourth Day

Furiosa awoke to hands gently shaking her. She brushed them away and rolled to her side, pressing her face into her soft pillow. The hands returned, their touch more urgent this time.

“Dearie, it's time to wake up. You have to get ready,” cooed the owner of the hands. “We mustn't keep him waiting.”

Furiosa opened her eyes against the soft sheets. She knew the voice like she knew the pain in her shoulder although it was duller now, like she knew the sheets were too soft, and the bed was all wrong. If she could just get back to sleep, she could make everything go away. 

The old woman was still prattling. “Your bath is ready. You don't want the water to get cold.”

Furiosa could think of no reason that might compel her to move. The woman's hands gave her one instead – sharp, angry pain like a smacked sunburn. She cried out as she reached for the back of her neck. There she found a neat, square bandage; she ran her fingers over the edges as she tried to remember the injury.

Finally she rolled to face Miss Nanny and looked her straight in the eyes. “What happened to my neck?”

“I'm don't know, dearie. It looks like a burn to me. I took the liberty of cleaning it and your other injuries while you were asleep.” She pulled the girl up to sitting and sat behind her so she couldn't lie down again. “I noticed it while I trimmed your hair. Don't you remember me asking about it?” She started combing her fingers through Furiosa’s hair which now curled under her chin. 

“No, I don't remember. You cut my hair while I was asleep?” Furiosa demanded.

"You don't remember that? You had terrible knots – would have been impossible to brush out,” explained Nanny, her voice never losing its pep.

Furiosa tightened her mouth and turned her attention to her body. She'd been stripped to her underwear, and sure enough, thick, black thread pulled her skin together where the bullet had grazed her days before – Had it been three or four? She frantically ran her hand over her chest to feel for the familiar lump in the folds of her bra. To her relief, it was still there, pressed against the underside of her left breast. 

“Everything alright dear?” 

No, everything was not alright. Everything was anything but alright. She thought of the peach stone, its hard form against her soft skin. In and out, she breathed against it. In and out she calmed herself.

“I still don't remember hurting my neck,” Furiosa remarked as she folded her arms across her chest.

"Well what can I say? Maybe that has something to do with that nasty bruise on the side of your noggin. You don't even remember your haircut,” offered Miss Nanny as she leaned in. Her own hair spilled over her shoulders in silver waves.

Furiosa ran her own hand over her hair, letting her fingers feel the crisp edges. "Can I see it?"

"Of course, after it's finished. We just took off the extra length and weight so there would be less to wash. It looks so much better already - more flattering, less frizzy. I think you'll be very pleased." She nudged the girl's back, "But we have to get going." 

So Furiosa reluctantly left the bed for the vacant, stone room after slipping her peach stone beneath her pillow. She hated to leave it and felt instantly weaker without it, but she had nowhere else to hide it. Already her clothing and boots were missing – perhaps they were with her hair. 

The bath water swallowed her, and by the time it spit her out again, her resolve was floating there amongst the suds. There's something about warm water that breaks down a person's defenses. It softens the shell around the heart, wrinkles the fingers and toes. And then like so many other times before and yet to come, the fresh water turned to salt.

### 

Miss Nanny took Furiosa by the arm and walked briskly while an entourage of living phantoms followed behind. She didn't recognize any of them from before - just more gaunt faces painted into pale anonymity. They led her through the winding corridors of the stone fortress, and with each step the walls closed more and more tightly around her. Then they stepped into a strange room with a moving floor. If she’d encountered such a wonder earlier in her short life she would have been mystified, maybe even afraid, but now it was just another horrid thing in an endless nightmare. 

These strange pale people had already cut her mass of tangled curls from her head and the hair from her body. They bathed her in wasted water; they washed the desert from her skin and replaced it with perfumes and powders. All the while she floated in her own body, too overwhelmed, too numb, too everything to protest. She was nothing but a silent stream of tears, now pale, naked, and vulnerable. They only gave her a scrap of white cloth like Nanny’s ridiculous sundress for protection.

“You need to be strong now my girl, no tears; you’ll ruin all our hard work,” the old woman admonished her as they stepped onto a still floor and continued to walk. Then she turned to face the girl, and her demeanor softened. “Don’t be afraid child. You’ll find life her easier than any you have known.”

But fear was not why the girl cried. She missed her home and her mother, and now she was in a strange place being made into a monstrous thing of soft skin and wrong smells. She had no heart for fear no heart for anger, no heart for anything at all.

“Whatever ever you do, whatever you’re feeling, you must always smile, or else he’ll reject you and throw you to the wretched mob. A pretty thing like you wouldn’t last long.” 

That didn’t sound so bad, she thought, being freed… “The Goddess will take care me,” she said, her voice clear.

As she spoked, the group passed through a metal doorway and stepped into an airy space. There, hanging from metal grates in the ceiling, Furiosa saw just about the only thing in the world that could still surprise her: green. Dangling pots of plants, leaves, vines, some she didn't even recognize, twisted themselves together and reached for her like old friends. 

“She already has,” said Miss Nanny, pleasure unmistakable in her voice as the two walked through this the rows. “She brought you here.”

The entire scene, green leaves, the dappled light, pale figures and all were reflected in clear, clean water. Furiosa crept to the edge of the pool as if any misstep might disturb the illusion. She kneeled reverentially and slipped a single finger beneath the surface. She jerked her hand away with a gasp. 

She turned towards Nanny, who was now leaning over her. Nanny reached for her face and carefully brushed the tears away. “But you’d best not speak about her here.” She touched up the powder on Furiosa’s cheeks then smoothed some kind of oil into what remained of her hair. “Our Immortal knows no God but his own.” 

“But my name means…”

“Don’t worry about that; with any luck, you’ll have a new one by the end of the day,” said Nanny as she tucked a curl behind the girl’s ear. “You’ll do fine.” 

Two men stood silhouetted against the expansive sky. Everyone around her dropped to a knee in some kind of a salute, hands meeting over their bowed heads, but Furiosa stood still. The master, the one Nanny had called Our Immortal, motioned for them to rise then strolled over. He stood tall and proud, resplendent and terrifying, with pale hair streaming down his back like sun beams and clear, blue eyes that moved too often. Those eyes traveled up and down her body. 

He turned to the man beside him, a thin man with a long face and beady eyes. “So what do you think? I presume she passed inspection?”

The other man replied, “Tall, healthy, a bit too thin, especially through the hips, but we can fix that no problem.”

“I can see all that. Go on.”

“I can’t tell if she’s a virgin, but she says she is. This young, I rather believe her - she cloud have broken her hymen doing any number of things... It's amazing what these barbarians will let their females do. Uterus and ovaries are in tact.”

“She's very precocious,” offered Miss Nanny. “She’s quiet because she's paying attention; she thinks before she speaks.”

The master folded his arms and lowered his chin to look her in the eyes. “She seems sad. I don’t like them sad.”

“Please forgive her. The boys who brought her in said she just lost someone important to her, probably her mother. The poor girl is in mourning. She just needs time to settle in, to rest, to meet the others,” pleaded Miss Nanny.

This time the Immortal directly to Furiosa. “My girl, I sincerely hope my boys were not responsible for any of your misfortune.”

“No, they were…” she swallowed as she searched for a word. “Merciful.”

“Mercy is not a quality I work to distill in them, but if it brought you to me, I'll take it.” He felt her cheek with his fingertips as if examining a peach. “It sounds like you have been through quite a lot.” He turned to Nanny, “And don't think for a minute you've successfully hidden those bruises,” he snapped, Furiosa's face still in his grasp. His attention returned to the girl in his hand. “But you've made it here, where you will be rewarded with treasures and comforts beyond your simple, female imagination.”

A shiver ran down the girl’s body at his words and twisted and churned her stomach. She wanted to run with every ounce of her being, but she had no where to go. So she thought of the peach stone now safely tucked in her boot and the precious seeds hidden inside the stone’s hard and rippled shell. She thought of the sweet flesh that once grew around it. She held these images in her mind as she took long, slow breaths, and with them willed herself to be calm… and even to smile.

“Lovely, absolutely lovely,” he beamed with sickening sweetness. “For your resilience, I will call you Durable.”

"Well chosen, Immortan, well chosen,” Nanny gushed.

The man called our Immortal moved his hand to the tender place in Furiosa's back beneath her shoulder blade, and steered her towards the opening in the stone wall. Every time she instinctively pulled away from his touch, she found herself moving in his intended direction. 

“And more importantly,” he continued as he walked, “you will have a purpose, a destiny: your sons will inherit the Earth – not this cesspit you see before you – as I have returned from the dead, I will return this world to life… with your help.”

Furiosa gazed out over the wasteland and its wretched inhabitants as the pressure on her back eased, and The Immortal’s hand slipped down to her waist. Here were her options drawn in stark relief: The Immortal and his stone fortress of water and green and presumptuous hands or the swarming, writhing mob. 

He took a microphone in his hand, “Today we salute my new wife, Durable,” he announced, his voice bouncing off the stone in powerful echoes. "May her womb be blessed and her days be many."

Then he operated a lever, and with that single miraculous motion, brought water from the rock and onto the teaming population below. Still her neck ached mysteriously as the people beat each other senseless with their dented pots and pans and tore each other's feeble flesh with their rotten teeth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vuvalini bras are typically of a wrapped design with cups defined by stitching between them and thick straps that can be tied in a variety of configurations. The Vuvalini have not yet developed any substitute for the modern sports bra with its stretch, support, and moisture wicking. Over time, a modern sports bra emerged as the unofficial gift for cementing a committed relationship. A Vuvalini would show devotion and commitment to his/her partner by obtaining a sports bra suiting her body and preferences. It's like an engagement ring but more intimate and practical.


	3. The Fourth Day - Part 3

Behind a round, metal door was a new, larger room with a collection of delicate creatures with soft touches and curious eyes. Each girl wore the same white cloth as Furiosa wore, and each scrap of fabric was artfully arranged to flatter the girl’s form. Furiosa wrapped a layer of sadness around herself between the white gauze and the saccharine air so all the hands examining her could only touch the sadness and not her self.

Miss Nanny called the girls to order so each might say her name and the number of children she had born: Beloved, June, Promise, and Snow. While each girl introduced herself in turn, Furiosa examined her new surroundings. Glass enclosed flames lit a round and open space – voices bounced off the cold stone walls. Stacks of old, yellow-smelling books lined them. On one side, dark passages opened up from the central area. A dome of metal scaffolding held back the sky, and to that scaffolding clung a few desperate vines. The center of the room was a shallow pool of water. The floor was entirely too clean, the air entirely too humid. Every word echoed.

“And this, everyone, is Durable,” declared Nanny. She responded to a shuffle in one of the back rooms by yelling, “Giddy, come meet Durable.”

A woman with books in her tattooed arms appeared. She was long and pointed in limbs and feature, probably smaller than Nanny overall but with a sharpness to her gaze. She begrudgingly nodded at Furiosa and said “Welcome,” before returning to the shadows. 

Dinner arrived soon after, rescuing Furiosa from any awkward conversations with the other girls. They regarded her with a certain practiced nonchalance now that her novelty had worn off, as if she needed further proof she was now just another of many. They ordered themselves carefully and deliberately for dinner. Beloved especially - she made certain the new girl saw her ample belly to its fullest advantage as she received the first and largest portion. Then June came behind her, followed by, Promise, Snow and then the newest arrival. Nanny and Giddy received their portions last and sent the unseen deliverers away, securing the massive door before taking their designated seats at the folding table.

Dinner was bundles of lettuce holding chunks of meat, potatoes, and an unusually bouyant cheese. Furiosa was glad for something solid after only eating soggy stews and soups, but she missed the flavors of home, and her sadness robbed her of her appetite. 

Tonight was Promise’s night, so the others sang to her while polished and powdered her skin to cloudy white and combed her dark hair. Their voices echoed about the run as they sang sweet love songs. Furiosa watched them from a chair against a wall; she hugged her knees to her chest and peered over top of them, wearing their shadow like a veil. Promise let her head drop, and her hair split over her neck. 

Another face met Furiosa’s, a face shaped from scarred skin - the crude cackle of the face from the front of the butte taunted her as it peered back at her. It's mouth hung open in glee. The face was horrific in the unsurprising way of a suspicion made certain. She could almost hear it's laughter as she felt her own neck. She could almost feel matching contours in the swelling flesh beneath the bandage. 

The Immortal came for Promise a short while later. He took her through a stone arch to one of the side rooms while the others waited in the opposite room and tried not to ignore the sounds of his pleasure.

"Remember, you are blessed among women,” said Nanny as she stood in the archway. “The Immortal trusts you with his seed and with the future of the world. Such a happy destiny, to be his treasured wives, to have your children inherent the world.”

Beloved nodded solemnly and rested her hands on her belly. The others stood in silence, except for Furiosa, who dove onto the nearest bed with the its metal frame and squeaking center. She buried her face in its blankets. She curled herself as she was overtaken by the knowledge that she had become exactly what her entire culture had been developed to prevent. Her body shook with sobs of failure.

“Hey, that’s my bed,” Snow protested.

“Leave her alone,” chided Beloved. “She’s new; you all cried when you were new.”

“Not on someone else’s bed,” Snow grumbled.

Beloved ignored her and instead sat beside the new girl. Her weight disturbed the mattress enough that Furiosa looked up. “Hey,” Beloved said softly, “It’s OK.” 

Furiosa narrowed her eyes and parted her lips in utter disbelief that anything could possibly be ‘OK.’

Beloved smiled in that sad way of a parent trying to explain death to a child - a blend of pride and pity. “I guess what I mean is… It gets better. I’ve been here 2500 days, since before we even had the Dome. The first night and your wedding night are the hardest, but the others… once you move forward, things start to feel normal. Some days are good; some days are really good. You find a reason to keep going, or a reason finds you. For me, it’s my children; for the others, it's each other. For you, who knows... Just know that you won't feel like this forever, and know that you aren’t alone.”

Furiosa said nothing. She simply turned away. A better person, a true Vuvalini, would have thanked Beloved for her kindness and begun to plan her escape. A real Vuvalini would not have let herself be taken here in the first place. So Furiosa wrapped herself in her guilt and her shame and braided them with her sadness. 

Furiosa was still crying by the time the Immortal left, and Nanny led her and Promise across the open room and into another small one with three more of the old fashioned, raised beds. There they found Promise sitting on a bed with clean, orderly blankets. She stared vacantly into the wall. June curled herself around Promise. She slipped her arms about the girl’s shoulders as Promise sighed, letting her body shrink and cave in as the air left her. 

Furiosa went to the furthest bed, the other with crisply folded blankets and a decadent pillow, and she did the same. If she kept breathing out a little more than she breathed in, could she shrink herself down to nothing? 

A single bed sat between the other two, its rumpled sheets filling the silence between them, its presence too large, too monstrous to go unnoticed. Mary would have called it an elephant. 

Furiosa said her nightly prayers as she waited for sleep to find her. She imagined herself taking a handful of earth and, she pulled her hand to her chest as she hoped her people were doing for her. She tightened the muscles of her abdomen in smooth, contemplative succession, and as her people would tie down their valuables before a coming storm, she tied herself to her Goddess. She begged the Goddess to send one of Medusa's snakes to avenge her and her mother. How could The Goddess allow such a place to flourish? How had she not spat fire on this place and torn away her precious plants to leave the stones bare and forsaken in the sun? Surely a mother did not deserve to be cut down for the a daughter’s mistakes.

But still, despite all her doubts, she said her nightly prayer; she thought the words as her mother had taught her and as her initiate mother had brought her to understand, “Hail Goddess, Mother of all. Blessed be your lands and your daughters who guard them. Tend us. Nourish us. Cultivate us so that we may be more like you – you who are boundless in your mysteries, radiant in your constance, righteous in your anger, ferocious in your power, and steadfast in your love, wise in your plans, and complete in your desolation. If it is your will that only one of these should be mine, let it be love.”

### Fourteen years earlier

When, the sky turned brown as rust, the people gathered what they could and ran for shelter. The little girl clutched her stick doll and stared at the angry sky. It rumbled and roared like a lioness from a story. She pulled her scarf over her mouth and her child-sized goggles over her eyes then reached for twisting clouds.

"C'mon, let's go!" said her mother Mary and scooped her up as she ran, but the girl screamed and kicked up a storm of her own.

"Hush," said her mother as she ran for an open sweet potato pit. "It's Ok."

She passed the girl to Grandmother Fang, who was already in the pit and ran to gather more supplies, but the child was still raging.

"Shh," said Grandmother Fang as she brushed sand from the girl's hair. "You're safe here."

The girl became quiet. "But I'm not scared," protested the girl. "I want to watch."

"The Avenging Mother is outside, come as Sekhmet. Her mane is dark clouds instead of hair. The roaring you hear is her anguish for her daughters and her land. She doesn't want to hurt you, but you still must stay out of her way." The girl pouted until Grandmother Fang said, " Her breath makes the desert. Her Furiosa stirs the sands."

"Furiosa like me?"

"Yes, like you."

The girl smiled then roared and batted the air with her fist as if they were paws.

Mary climbed inside with a jug of water slung over her shoulder and tied down the door behind her. "Oh," she gave her daughter a smirk. "Are you pretending to be Sekhmet?

"No! I'm just being me. I'm saying hello in Lioness."

"Oh, you speak Lioness?" asked Mary.

Fang shrugged. "Apparently she does."

Furiosa roared and snarled until her snarls turned to giggles. Then she tugged her mother's sleeve. "I wannna go watch."

"You have to stay out of her way," said Mary. "She's busy now, not to be bothered."

Furiosa was disappointed that Sekhmet wouldn't want to see her. She was named for her anger after all. She roared again, louder this time, not in protest or play but from a simple, primal desire to be heard.

"When she's finished, you can say goodbye to her," Mary offered.

The girl still seemed disappointed, but she relented.

When the winds became quiet, and Mary lifted the hatch to see light returning to the sky, she lifted Furiosa from the pit. The girl roared with triumph and pawed the air with glee at the departing haboob. It looked not unlike a lion with its bushy top and funnels for legs. One last cloud wisp even trailed behind it in a shape that clearly resembled waving tail, or at least it did in the mind of one exceptionally pleased little girl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cheese in this chapter is made from human breastmilk. The description of its texture is borrowed from: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131202-human-cheese-food-biology-weird-gastronomy/#close
> 
> Each of the qualities in the Vuvalini prayer is a rough translation of a specific neologism as further defined here:
> 
> Mysteries = Sophia - Divine wisdom, knowledge, understanding of hidden truths. Associated figure: Athena  
> Constance = Endura - Divine persistence, how the divine is without end or beginning even though it is in constant change. Associated figure: Gaia.  
> Anger = Furiosa - Divine anger, purposeful rage at the violation of Loga, Dignita, etc. Associated figure: Sekhmet, also Medusa.  
> Power = Potesta - Divine strength and power. Associated figure: Durga.  
> Plans = Loga - Divine order, balance, flow of energy and matter from one form to another; the constant development of the divine; the passage of time; the universal drumbeat, fate. Associated figure: Themis  
> Desolation = Digreda - Divine destruction, renewal, constant breakdown to allow rebuilding. Associated Figure - Kali, Reaping Mother.  
> Love = Keniosa - Divine surrender, divinely connected so that divisions cease, the emptying and opening of the self. Associated figure: Hercules.
> 
> The concept of Keniosa is a combination of Christian Kenosis, Christian Agape, Daoist Wu-Wei, and Zen Mu-shin. It has a parallel in just about every religion. Kenosis is to me the most interesting and immediately relevant of these concepts to this fandom. Really, someone (preferably with religious credentials beyond my internet ordination) should write a multi-page meta on Kenosis in Fury Road. It is per Wikipedia, "self-emptying," and it is typically used in the sense of "being receptive to God or Divine will." It is almost always used in the context of a sacrifice, but in Protestant traditions, Kenosis is also the process by which God created the word. Given Vuvalini conceptions of the Divine as being omnipresent and all-encompassing, the Vuvalini extend this concept to included any type of Union or connection, such as between a person and nature or between multiple persons. It's feeling small before nature. It's, to use a description Furiosa says in one of my other fics, "She Used to Dance," being "profoundly humbled." Specifically in the Union of two persons, there is no correct response to an act of Kenosis other than to engage in Kenosis. There is no mothering, no nurturing without Kenosis. There can be no connection without a certain surrendering of the self. You have to empty enough of yourself and, more importantly, your ideas about yourself, to make room to connect with another.


	4. The Fifth Day

_And Death took the girl for his own,_  
_Bade her live within his halls, walk within his gardens,_  
_Bade her eat of his fruit and drink of his rivers,_  
_And therein she learned the tastes_  
_Of doubt, of fear, of sorrow, of shame._

### 

Furiosa awoke the next morning to the sounds of the skull army drilling. She followed their voices to the dome where she could see their white bodies arrange themselves in lines and columns. They shouted strange words in unison before dropping to the ground in a series of exercises. She recognised some of them- the words, not the people, but she had to wonder if the one she called Reaper had known what would become of her.

The other girls soon joined her in the dome, and the one called Giddy led the group in their own series of exercises. For “healthy bodies, healthy babies,” they stretched the sleep from their limbs and moved through a sequence of push-ups, sit-ups, and and jumps. Furiosa easily doubled the repetitions and was disappointed when the session ended. She’d have to find time for more later because during those few, brief moments she could forget everything but the sweat in her eyes and fatigue in her muscles.

Breakfast was a creamy soup. Then, after taking turns cleaning themselves with entirely too much water, the girls sat for their first lesson of the day: ancient history. They folded up the breakfast table and sat in a semi-circle with Nanny in the middle while she read from a dilapidated book. Each girl held a small, black board like the larger one beside Miss Nanny.

“Who would like to catch Durable up on what’s happened so far?” asked Nanny.

“The hero Aeneas was destined to found the greatest empire in the world," Beloved began. He Left the remnants of his burning city and traveled far to the west, to a place ordained for him by fate. His story mirrors that of our own Immortan Joe who was led from the ruins of Sydney to fulfill the plans of the Universal Engine.”

All except Furiosa held the hands above their heads with fingers interlaced, “V-8.”

“Very good,” Nanny said. “Now as we continue, I want you To write down all the new similarities you find between Aenea’s story and Our Immortal’s.” She looked directly at Furiosa. “Durable, can you write?”

“Well enough.”

Nanny bristled at her presumptuousness. “I assure you there’s always room for improvement.” She sent Giddy to stand behind Furiosa just in case she needed help spelling a word.

Nanny read from the book of how Aeneas returned from the Underworld and came upon a place called Italy. That land was already inhabited, but it was meant for Aeneas and the race he would found. V-8 would lead him in a great battle and find for him a wife of purest virtue.

The other girls wrote furiously on their blackboards, their nubs of chalk making soft scratching sounds. Furiosa rolled the chalk between her fingers, letting the white powder coat them. Then she wrote a single word on her blackboard: Immortal.

“Very good, Durable,” Miss Giddy whispered as she leaned over Furiosa’s shoulder. “Can you explain your thought process to me?”

“The Underworld means the ground, where the dead are buried? So it’s like Aeneas died, but didn’t die, like he’s immortal. Did The Immortal do that too?”

Giddy leaned closer and softened her voice even more. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I figure, you can’t really know you’re immortal until you should die, but you don’t… But then how do you know if you are really immortal? What if you just got lucky?”

“I think for you and me, we would have to assume we just got lucky and not test our luck with a next time. We wouldn’t want to be wrong about such things.” She met Furiosa’s eyes. “We can’t all be divinely ordained.” Then she walked over to June to check on her progress.

Furiosa thought about The Underworld while the others discussed the story. Her people didn’t believe in such a place, but she knew of it vaguely from other stories. It was ruled by a god named Hades, who stole Persephone and made her a prisoner while the earth grew cold from her mother Demeter's mourning. She wondered how K.T. was doing, if their empty house was too lonely to bear.

The next lesson was music. Furiosa could follow along easily. The songs were different, but the concepts were the same: scales, notes, rhythms, meters. Then came science, where they leaned about gravity and the other forces that gave structure to the universe, which then led to mathematics. Furiosa knew the basics well enough and how to apply them, but after she and Giddy exchanged glances, Furiosa saw an opportunity and raised her hand.

"Yes, Durable."

“I think I need more help on this,” she said to Nanny with feigned shyness. “Could I have Miss Giddy help me?” Then she added, “I don’t want to slow everyone else down.”

Nanny approved. She seemed pleased to have finally found a subject the new girl didn’t ready know. So she sent Durable and Miss Giddy across the room. 

“Alright,” said Giddy as she sat on the floor beside Furiosa. She began writing on her own little blackboard, “Do as I do.” Her white chalk scratched and squeaked in weak protest.

Furiosa nodded and whispered, “You seem different from Nanny.” 

“I am different.” She drew a square. 

Furiosa copied her. “I don’t mean just younger, you really do seem different.”

She didn’t know why she trusted this woman or if she should even think of it as trust. Maybe it was the sharpness of her eyes, how they seemed to almost glare even when the rest of her seemed relaxed. Maybe it was how the lines on the woman's arms and legs reminded her of her own people's predilection to sketch little flowers on every surface that would hold them. Maybe she still just couldn't wrap her head around the idea of an older woman who wasn't on her side.

“As I said,” Giddy drew a line cutting the square into triangles, “I am different. In the words of my parents’ generation, Miss Nanny has…” she spoke even more quietly, “drunk the Kool-aide.”

“What does that mean?”

“She’s not skeptical like you and I. She doesn’t think that…” Giddy paused to look around and make sure no one was paying attention. “That Our Immortal ‘just got lucky.’” She then turned her attention back to her drawing. “You see, every square can be divided into two triangles…”

“So what really did happen? A person can’t really be immortal?”

"I don’t think it’s our place to say, but given as much as I’ve seen and how long I’ve known him, I have my doubts?"

“So what really happened?” Furiosa asked again as she doodled on her blackboard.

“V-8 led him here, or so he told everyone. He took this place, I imagine much as he took you, by slaughtering everyone who got in his way.”

“His Warriors were stronger than the ones who already had this place?”

“Not just his warriors; he was with them. He snuck inside with a handful while other waited. For three days, we thought he was dead. They were about to move on and cut their loses when he emerged alive and unscathed where everyone else had perished.” She let her volume rise for that part. “I was there. No one knows how he survived.”

“You really were there?” Furiosa asked.

“Yes,” said Giddy, “That was seven years ago, and I was already his slave. Nanny was with him too. She convinced him to keep me because I was educated, and she needed someone to carry on her work just as he does.” She sat down cross legged beside the girl and pointed to a single word among many tattooed in the crook of her arm. “This is my real name. What’s yours?”

Durable wrote one letter at a time on the blackboard. “F-U-R-I-O-S-A,” and she let each letter sit there for a short moment before she wiped it away and wrote the next.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Furiosa,” said Giddy as she took the girl’s hand in her tattooed palm. “That’s a lovely name, though Durable isn’t too bad either. You could have gotten saddled with something terrible like Giddy.”

"So should I call you by your real name? Should I call you Jennifer?”

"Giddy for now. And then that,” she pointed to a number I the cruch of her arm, “is my birthday.” She raised her voice, “Let’s calculate the sum.” Both scribbled the digits on their blackboards. “What number did you get? Good, 23 is correct. Do you know your birthdate?”

“No.”

“That’s all right; plenty to of people don’t know these days. How old are you?”

“Eighteen winters, seventeen springs.”

“We’ll just use that number then.” Giddy wrote 18 and 23 along the sides of her original square, making it not so much of a square anymore. “We used to be so preoccupied with age," she used as she wrote. I never thought I would consider myself so privileged to make it to fifty-five. Do you remember anything about the old world?”

“No, I was born in the new one, but I’ve heard things. I like the stories about the cold air boxes. They could keep meat fresh forever.”

“Your family came from on of the first cities to fall, I guess, before Sydney…most of us here came from there.” Miss Giddy smiled. “I remember freezers. We should talk more about the old days. There’s a saying that goes something like, “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Did anyone ever tell you want happened?”

She nodded furiously. “People abused the Earth, and the Goddess became angry. She threw storms at cities and shook the ground. She became Sekhmet and breathed fire over the land, spreading the desert so crops wouldn’t grow. The people fought over what was left and destroyed it in the process.” She paused. “I was told only my people could still grow crops because we are good to the Earth and good to each other. How is it that plants still grow here?”

She didn’t need to say why they shouldn’t. The deeds of this place were all too apparent, but the evidence was clear; there was green. Miss Giddy was very quiet as she drew a symbol on her blackboard, an 8 on it’s side. “Do you know what this means?”

“Eight, sideways.”

“The sideways part changes the meaning.”

“Then no.”

“Infinity – everything that is, was, or will be, all the time, all the space, everything that ever happens, everything that ever could happen - in our world and every possible way our world comes out. That is how there can be room for so much bad in the world.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. That's the point, I guess. There's room for all the good in the world and all the bad, room for everything that doesn't make any sense because we make the room. We humans create our world with every choice we make.”

“What about The Goddess?”

“Of course, there's room for lots of goddesses, gods too.”

Their eyes met for an instant, and Furiosa asked, “Room for an immortal?”

Miss Giddy nodded. "And for a man who just got lucky."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Miss Nanny is obviously making changes to the Aeneid to suit her purposes.
> 
> One of the neighboring tribes had a festival for the dead, which her people had merged with their own Samhain of the Reaping Mother because they loved nothing if not a celebration. While the neighbors danced to keep away the angry spirits of those they’d killed in war and raids, the Vuvalini danced to bid fair well to their menfolk and to thank the Reaping Mother for her destructive power that took life and made it food. They danced to remember those whom the Reaping Mother had taken, the losses that were gains; they danced to thank the dead for their sacrifices and to let them defuse back into the Resting Mother of the Earth when they had no more friends or family needing their protection. Then, just as the Birthing Mother had already reused their bodies, she reused their souls as well.
> 
> Vuvalini homes are made of mud brick. They are roughly the size and configuration of Ancient Egyptian middle class homes. Most have a main sitting room, a bed room, and a kitchen used mostly for food preparation. Each family has an outdoor composting toilet. Water is stored on the roof.


	5. Days of Fog and Memory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for assault, harassment, eating disorders

###  Some Days Remembered, Some Days Forgotten

She floated through her days like a fog through a canyon. Their forms blended, only their sharpest edges distinguishing the passage of time. Exercise, lessons, meals, baths, evenings…they all became almost tolerable as hours turned to days, and the days piled on top of eachother. This is how time passed for the girl called Durable while she wrapped herself in her grief until it numbed her. Each moment of her existence became like one more step for a hiker trudging up a sand dune.

### The 22nd Day

The wasteland reached out to her as it did every night, wrapped itself around her, blew dust against the ancient glass of the dome. Still she imagined the grit on her skin; she wondered if stones being eroded to nothing felt their impending disappearances. The landscape moaned like a tortured soul or a body in the grips of fever. It churned up sounds and sights of swirling yellows, oranges, and reds. In its own violent way, it was beautiful. The long sunset bathed the sky in blood to match the land. It streamed from the sky as from an open wound, and just like blood it all turned black - just like the ash left behind after a fire, it covered everything it touched. No nitrogen to turn the dust to soil, just dark expanse like blood in the night.

A hand on her wrist...another reaching the around her the wrong way... Her heart exploded with fear. Her breath was suddenly ragged and her eyes wide. She slammed her free fist into the offending forearm and struck with the newly freed palm, grasped the hand on her wrist. It contorted as she moved.

"Ahh!" - a gasp of genuine fear. "What are you doing?"

The figure before her was Miss Giddy, her body caving beneath Furiosa's touch, but her face twisted up, betraying her concern.

"Oh," was all Furiosa managed as she willed her hands to relax and promptly crossed them over her chest. Her pulse still pounded through her bones. Her breaths were still too shallow.

"Are you alright?" Giddy asked, rubbing her own wrist.

"You startled me." She looked away, down to the floor, as she tried to stop herself from quivering.

"I didn't mean to." She reached to touch the girl's shoulder.

The girls shifted her weight back. "I know," she said before walking away, willing the woman not to follow her.

###  The 113th Day

The other girls received their visits from The Immortal, except for Beloved of course with her belly and status both bloating. Furiosa would sometimes notice their others crying when they thought no one was paying attention, and she would oblige them by forcing her attentions elsewhere until ignoring them no longer took any effort. Just like the army drilling outside, the other girls blended into the background of her own misery. Truth be told, attention was so focused on Beloved and her child, on the strong kicks of the exuberant baby, and on the beaming smile of the happy mother that Furiosa almost forgot how the baby came to be. 

But when the man with the beady eyes, the one they called Organic Mechanic, came with his apprentice to check the baby’s progress, their eyes would wander over Furiosa’s body as well.

The Mechanic would nudge his apprentice and make some comment like, “Amazing what good nutrition can do,” or “You could almost fit a baby in there.”

The Immortal would nod his approval. “Just a little longer,” he would say.

Her skin would crawl, stirring her from her willful ignorance if only for a moment. Once hands began to prod and squeeze her, checking the growth of her flesh as one might an animal being fattened for slaughter, the truth refused to be buried. 

Miss Giddy caught her throwing up her dinner that night, as much as one could be caught doing anything without anywhere to hide. At first she struggled to bring food from her belly. For every laboured retch a pang of shame at her wastefulness held her dinner down. She fought against herself, gagging and sputtering like a spent engine while she cranked and twisted her insides. Sobs racked her entire body until she was weak, tired, and finally empty.

“Durable?” Miss Giddy knelt beside her. The girl kept sobbing with her forehead pressed against the cool stone wall. “Furiosa.”

She sniffled and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I’m ok.”

Giddy filled the bucket with water from the spout and began to rinse out the sanitation trough for her. “No you’re not," she sighed, "but none of us are. This won’t help.”

“But if I stop eating…” She sobbed again, this time feeling the full ache in her abdomen and burn in her throat left behind from her efforts.

Giddy shook her head. “He’ll send you outside to starve. Trust me, you’ll feel better if you eat.” 

Furiosa watched her dinner wash away through the grate in the wall. "I want to go home."

"I know." She wetted a cloth and pressed it in Furiosa’s hand. “I do too,” she said as she turned to leave. 

Furiosa lifted her head as the woman walked away. With her braid tossed over her shoulder the skull on the back of Giddy’s neck cackled for all to see. 

"Miss Giddy, what do you mean I’ll feel better if I eat?”

She stopped. Her eyes scanned the room before she spoke. “No matter how hard the day, a full belly will put you right to sleep.” She ran her fingers over scarred skin on the back of her neck, “You won’t feel a thing.”

###  Interlude: Six Years Earlier

Grandmother Fang sat behind a drum as big around as she was. The clan's young people all gathered before her lined up from senior to junior, with the youngest children in the back with their own assistants. Fang’s stare looked almost vacant when she watched her students from behind the drum as she marked a steady beat. Somehow she managed to monitor them all at once, her eyes never missing the slightest mistake. She would tighten her mouth when her girls hesitated, click her tongue when they faltered. 

"Roll," she murmured. "No, there's a pistol there. You have to pick it up,” she chided Furiosa for forgetting to grab an imaginary weapon during a forward shoulder roll. “Do it again.” 

Furiosa collected herself with a single, nervous breath then crouched and launched herself towards the ground. She remembered to extend her hand as her body arced, but she curled herself too tightly. She winced as the point of her shoulder blade hit the ground. Even so, she finished the roll and stood, waiting for direction. 

The other students still waited where they landed. A palpable tension strung them all together. The older students watched sympathetically without breaking their alignment. The younger students who were waiting alongside had to giggle in failed attempts to break it, but Grandmother Fang silenced them with a glare. 

"Just start over," Fang finally said, shaking her head.

The students reset themselves with anxious precision. Furiosa clenched her jaw as she tried to mimic the movements of the older apprentices. They seemed to moved expertly, seemed because Fang was still openly dissatisfied.

"Relax," commanded the old woman as if that were a command that could be easily followed.

Furiosa collected her tension, closed, her eyes and then opened them again. She did feel better, but now she was behind. The drumbeat was relentless, and some of the movements were quick. Was it better to skip ahead or to rush to catch up? Her punches moved sloppily, and her blocks became clouded by doubt. But each movement was intended to have a precise beat, even a precise part of a beat. Fang's eyes were fixed on her and narrow with silent criticism. 

"No, Furiosa, you skipped a move."

Her cheeks burned pink. The drumming moved on without her. 

"No, there's two punches on that side, both in the same beat." The woman shook her head and rose from her seat. 

Everyone stopped. The woman almost never moved. For her to rise from her cushion was unthinkable. She walked to Furiosa and placed her ancient hands on the girl's slim hips. 

"Your hips should be forward here. Have you even practiced this at all?" Fang grumbled.

"Yes, Grandmother."

“Carry on,” Fang ordered the other students.

Movement by movement the girl was tweaked into alignment while her shame burned through her body. She wanted to run from that place, to curl up in the back corner of her house and never look anyone in the face again. But she held herself steady and tried to focus on each minute correction so she could remember later.

“There, we’ll do better next time, won't we?”

She willed her eyes forward, willed her voice to be clear. “Yes, Grandmother.” 

“Are you nervous?”

“A little, Grandmother.”

“More than a little, I think.” The old woman smiled, breaking the cold character she had adopted. She pressed a hard object into the girl’s palm. “That just means I'm doing my job. Practicing your patterns isn't enough. You must also practice fear.”

Furiosa examined the gift in her hand. It was shaped like tear drop but red like blood. She slid her thumb nail along one of the thick grooves in its shell. She held it to her nose and took a long breath; she could still smell the fruit flesh – peach.

“You must first break the protecting armour before the seeds can grow,”Grandmother Fang explained as she turned away, and then in a whisper she added, “Well done.” She tucked herself behind her drum before announcing, “Again, from the beginning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Vault is made up of the Dome in the center and four side rooms, two for the girls and one each for Nanny and Giddy. Each room has its own Citadel toilet, which is comprised of a water spout that can be turned on and off and a trough that slopes downwards through the closest wall. The toilet is "flushed" by pouring water through the trough. The spout is also the source of drinking water. The pool in the center of the Dome room is primarily for bathing, but it drains through a small pipe at the center. All waste is washed out through a central pipe, until it reaches a central collection point beneath the residential levels where the solids are separated for use in fertiliser.
> 
> I am planning to give Lisa "Grandmother" fang a significant role in K.T.'s POV chapter. I just haven't found a place for it yet. I do want to address the whole "mystical Asian" trope though. She's doing it on purpose. The Vuvalini are all about empowerment through self-actualisation, and Fang is using that trope to craft her persona. She's also having a lot of fun doing it.


	6. The 124th Day

_She remained there, an anomaly among the shades,_  
_And the darkness coated her like oil,_  
_Painted her with morbid camouflage,_  
_Through her skin seeping, bleeding-_  
_Skin grown fragile so hidden from the sun._

### 

Her _special day_ came far too soon. The darkness of the night before stayed too long, but dread made for a rubbish sleeping partner, so she wandered the dark shadows of The Vault. She wrapped them around her. Then she clung to them when she heard hushed voices and pulled them over her face so she could hide from the only other two people awake.

“Well, if she won't agree to it, we’ll just have to dose her again. It's for her own good,” Nanny hissed.

“She's on to it now. She won't eat any of the soups,” countered Miss Giddy.

“I don't know why you had to go and tell her?”

“How else was I supposed to ask her if she wanted it?” Furiosa could almost hear a shrug in her voice.

“If she tries anything….”

“She's too smart to try anything.”

“If – I said if – we will get a far worse punishment than she does.”

“That doesn't make it right to…”

“Right?” Nanny’s voice broke with emotion. “So you would rather have her suffer? You would rather have us suffer? Even with everything Immortan Joe does, he still feeds us, protects us, gives us shelter and water. How long would you last anywhere else?”

Footsteps patted towards Furiosa. She pressed herself against a wall and held her breath while Miss Giddy passed, too preoccupied to notice.

Giddy spat as she paced, “I'm not denying any of that, but I have to draw a line somewhere. My line is lying to them. If we are so lucky to be here, we shouldn't have to drug them into happiness. We shouldn’t be lying to them…”

“Who’s lying? We're telling them the truth: 'Una salus victis, nullam sperare salutem….' besides, they get to win the evolutionary lottery; their children will inherit the earth.”

“Is that what we call winning now?” Miss Giddy hissed from the passageway leading to Miss Nanny’s room.

“It’s nothing to sneeze at – better than what we get.”

Giddy sighed as she circumambulated the center pool with sharp and choppy steps. “What if these girls were your daughters, would you feel the same way then?”

Nanny continued, “I would rather they be here than out there alone or sold to God-knows-whom. Haven't you learned your lesson by now? I don’t know how you can be so hypocritical. You’re as much an accomplice to this as I am, as guilty as anyone,” but Giddy had already disappeared into her own room. Nanny spun with a huff and withdrew.

Then The Vault was quiet again. Furiosa crept along the shadows to the ledge where the glass panes of The Dome met the stone of the butte. She clutched her knees to her chest as the stared out into the still and silent early morning. So much darkness – no moon, not even stars, just low-hanging clouds that would never drop rain. 

It would be almost to the Solstice by now. The days were long; the heat should be strengthening, though she never felt it in The Vault. Her people would have been gathering first harvest. She wondered if they would have enough food for the summer, if the long season plants would survive, and if K.T. was all right. 

She ran her fingers over her peach stone and held it to her nose. Summer meant the orchards would smell like peaches. She inhaled deeply; the bright, sweet scent had long since dissipated from its shell.

Instead she set it on the ledge beside her. “Will I ever get home?” She flicked the stone so it spun before she decided which orientation meant yes. 

### 

She must have fallen asleep because she opened her eyes to the first tentative glow of dawn. The Vault was now bustling with activity and pleasant chatter. There would be no standard course of lessons today. Instead there were giggles and whispers, the smell of fresh greens and flowers. 

Furiosa stretched as she sorted the memories of where she was and why. She rolled to her back and tried to decide if she was hungry or nauseous - probably the mostly the latter - and if that was due to nerves or to withdrawal from whatever drug was in the food she hadn't been eating. Miss Giddy had been right when she assured her she’d only feel worse if she avoided the altered food. She felt vaguely sick and lightheaded but painfully present. She told herself it wasn't hunger, at least not mostly; she told herself that she knew hunger, but then she worried that she had forgotten. 

She tightened her body into serious of crunches. She found a certain satisfaction in the sound and feel of her spine grinding against the stone ledge. She counted her repetitions in silence until the aches in her front became muscular and manageable and she was certain she would have a blossoming bruise on her back to show for her efforts. 

Then she propped herself up again the glass of The Dome. With any luck it would break. She imagined a network of fractures spreading from her body. Then she would strike the fragile surface with her shoulder, and she would ride an explosion of shimmering shards to the ground below.

"Good morning,” cooed Beloved as she slipped a garland of leaves around Furiosa's neck. 

The girl looked up at her with the silence of one who had run out of disbelief. She said nothing. She simply rolled to her belly and began a series of push-ups.

“I mean, how are you doing?” Beloved asked as she crouched beside her. 

The garland brushed against the ground and then collapsed into itself. “I’ll live,” Furiosa said. 

"Of course you will,” Beloved reassured her. Then she crouched beside the younger girl and waited in silence.

And then, after some hazy length of time, Furiosa asked, “Will it hurt?”

“At first, yes,” Beloved said, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond The Dome, “But if you are cooperative, he will be gentle, in his way.”

Furiosa swallowed the bile rising in her throat as she continued her push-ups. “And if I’m not _cooperative?_ "

“Never think that him needing you healthy means he won't punish you,” Beloved whispered. She leaned in closer as June approached with her own gift of greenery. “He has ways to break you.”

“I tried to jump,” added June. “He punished me.” When Furiosa met hers she pleaded, “Don't be like me. Don't try to jump.”

Furiosa set her knees on the floor and sat back on her heels. She had never thought to jump, not seriously at least. Dead girls don't make it home.

Beloved took her hand and began to rise to standing. “I am his favorite because I give him what he wants. Then he gives me what I want.”

"Like what?” Furiosa stayed on the floor.

“He lets me see my children. He brings me presents from the outside.”

June nodded in solemn agreement. "He brought us the B and R volumes of the encyclopedia when Beloved conceived."

“Does he ever let you go home?” Furiosa asked as she started to rise.

“You mean the place where I lived before here?” Beloved shrugged. “ Why would I want to go back there? I'm a spent woman; there would be nothing for me.” She gave Furiosa’s hand a tug. “C’mon, it’s time for breakfast. We get celebration food today, sauces, spices, all the good stuff...”

Plates and plates of food arrived in the Vault. First came the usual potatoes, today fried with red sauce. Then came buttered cornbread and sausages rubbed with spices. There were even little sweetened pastries. She examined each item closely and only ate what Beloved did. As she had become accustomed, she avoided the liquids, only sampling the strange red sauce or the sticky pastry coating after Beloved tried them first. As, promised the food was delicious. She wished she could enjoy it freely, but she knew she couldn’t let her guard down. She wanted her senses sharp and her mind clearest just in case. 

In case of what? She wasn’t sure - an opportunity maybe. Whatever happened, she wanted to know. If she left a void in her memory, her mind would fill it with its own horrible conjurings.

Then, when she was meant to be content and compliant from her full belly, warm water was drawn to the center pool for her bath. Beloved read poems about love while Miss Nanny and Giddy scrubbed the dead skin from Furiosa’s body With pumice. The girls sang as the older women shaved her armpits and legs. When they reached her feet and tried to rub away her calluses, she kicked their hands and tools away. 

“Durable, don’t you want nice, soft feet?” chided Miss Nanny.

“No,” she folded her arms over her chests do sank deeper into the water, “I don’t.” 

Snow leaned in to get a closer look. "They look like Wretched feet,” she declared.

Furiosa glared with her chin just skimming the surface of the now soapy water. “They look like feet.”

“They’re not so bad. He probably won't even notice. We just gave to pick something else to play up,” Beloved offered.

Miss Giddy shrugged. "Her feet, her wedding day. Her eyes are her best feature anyway, how they change colors in different lighting.”

Furiosa feigned coyness as the women admired the colors of her eyes, and while they were distracted she withdrew her feet and crossed her legs beneath the water. She didn't mind the shaving so much; it was pointless but temporary so hardly worth the effort of a protest. Her calluses though… she'd earned them, and without the hot sand beneath her feet, she didn't know that they would ever return once removed.

By the time she was out of the water and dressed in soft robes, another meal was waiting outside. The women filled any spare room in their stomachs with pastries stuffed with eggplant and sweet potatoes. Then they rubbed oils over Furiosa’s body and braided little leaves and flowers into her hair. She wondered how much of the joy her fellow wives expressed was for her and how much was for the day of feasting. She suspected the majority was for the latter. 

“What will the wedding be like?” Furiosa asked while Beloved coloured her fingernails with foul smelling paint.

“We will all be with you. He will bring you before the people,” answered Miss Giddy, who was filing her toenails into smooth, dainty shapes.

“You will stand with him and his sons,” said Beloved. “Try to ignore Scaborus, the oldest. He should be on his best behavior, but for him that isn’t saying much. He tries to play off his antics as teenage rebellion, but in another year or so everyone will have to face the truth; he’s a despicable, soulless excuse for a human being.

“Corpus will be in the middle. He’s absolutely extraordinary. He’s a bit shocking to see though; try not to stare. He’s the brightest boy I’ve ever met. He’s not mine, but he might as well be; I love him as much. If you ever doubt that the Immortal is capable of goodness, just look at Corpus; Joe cared for him during The Fall. Can you imagine the three of them fleeing Sydney just like Aeneas fleeing the fall of Troy?”

Beloved set Furiosa’s hand down gently. “Don’t move this one.” Then she continued, “Then there will be Rictus, the gentle giant; he is mine. You won’t believe he’s only six, he’s so big...”

“Oh here we go again,” teased Snow from across the room. 

Beloved ignored her And lifted Furios’s other hand from her lap. The nails shimmered red.. “He has the sweetest disposition, such a big heart. He’s what people used to call _simple_ , and I can't think of a better way to be. It would certainly make life easier, and deep down, I think an easy life is something every mother wants for her children.”

Beloved blew across the girls other fingers. “Right, the wedding,” she reminded herself. “He will speak sweet words to you, share a cup of water with you, and kiss you on the mouth. You don't need to do anything except smile and nod, and then raise the cup to your lips when it is given; you don't even need to actually drink – he’ll never know the difference. But if you visibly refuse, the people will not get their water, and they will die.”

“You will be surrounded by guards the entire time,” Miss Giddy cautioned. “Are you sure, you don’t want my help?” Miss Giddy asked as she selected a strand of Furiosa’s hair to free from its braid.

Furiosa nodded. She had enough holes in her memory; she didn’t need any more. She could think of no time in her life she’d ever been more afraid then when she woke up tied up in a strange tint with only the barest fragments of memory to explain her presence there. She was determined to avoid repeating those terrifying moments of uncertainty. The knowledge that Nanny and Giddy had similarly played with her mind since she’d come to this terrible place haunted her with devious reminders that she was friendless. 

“You said once you had multiple children; do you mean Rictus and Corpus?” Furiosa asked Beloved.

“I have a daughter too.” Beloved blew on Furiosa’s thumb. “She is learning to help in the kitchens. She won’t be there.”

“Is she Joe’s?”

“Of course,” said Beloved in the disbelief of one slightly offended.

Furiosa stared at the red paint on her nails. “If already has children, why does he need us?”

“Well,” Beloved started, “his sons are unsuitable to rule. As his empire grows, he will need his sons to help him rule it. He may be immortan, but he is not omni-present.”

“What about his daughters?” Furiosa feared she knew the answer already, but she needed to ask anyway. She needed to hear it spoken. 

"Also unsuitable,” said Beloved as if such an answer were obvious. 

But still Furiosa pressed, “Or his wives?” The word seemed to burn her tongue.

Beloved laughed. “Seriously, Durable, have you ever heard of a woman ruling anything.”

And there it was: the entire world was made of Palas. “Dido,” Furiosa answered coldly.

“And we all know how that turned out,” said Beloved with a good natured smile. "We'll just add this one last thing..." She smeared some sort of creme on Furiosa's lips with her pinkie finger.

“And Priam, ruled Troy; we all know how that one turned out as well,” Miss Giddy interjected with a sympathetic glance at Furiosa. 

Beloved held up a small, round mirror. 'Have a look."

Furiosa hardly recognised the face that looked back at her - eyes and and painted, cheeks too full, hair too dark, skin too pale, mouth too red. The girl lowered her eyes. Troy burned. Carthage’s soil was sewn with salt. Rome fell too in it’s time; so was the way of the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Una salus victis, nullam sperare salutem," means, "The best hope for the hopeless is to hope for none." Aeneid 2.354.
> 
> The wives are being given Barbitone, aka Barbital, which was the first barbiturate discovered by Western medicine. It can be made from apple ether and urea (of course the actual chemistry is a touch more complicated). In powder form it is white, odorless, and only slightly bitter tasting. It can be dissolved in water, which is how Miss Nanny is adding it to liquid foods and some sauces. It's been replaced by more sophisticated drugs in our time, but when first discovered and in Furiosa's time it it used as a sedative, hypnotic, and anti-anxiety medication. The Misses have an agreement with Organic (the predecessor to the one in the film) that if they make the drug and administer it when the new wives arrive for their first examinations, and also keep him supplied with Ether for anesthesia, he won't intervene in their affairs. This allows them to not only make the drug available to the wives as requested but also allows them freedom in their other chemistry experiments. Of course, the Misses can't decide on how exactly the drugs should be distributed.
> 
> The Citadel diet at this time consists primarily of hydroponically grown vegetables and potatoes gown in augmented soil (ala The Martian). Human breast milk provides all dairy products, but it is low in protein compared to other milk types. Proteins come from beans, lentils, and human meat. Certain items from the Old World, such as the "red sauce," which is catsup, are consumed on special occasions.


	7. The 124th Continued and the 125th Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: this chapter is the closest this story will get to a "rape scene." It's plenty vague, but that's definitely what's going on. Please don't be shy about feedback; this is the first such scene I've ever written and I want to get it "right" even if I don't quite know how to "define right."

### The 124th Day 

Furiosa walked with tentative steps as her robes of white cloth trailed behind her. Her every slightest movement caused a shower of leaves and petals to sprinkle around her. They fell from her garlands and from her hair. She clutched a bundle of corn; its wispy husk tickled her powdered and painted face.

As promised, the wives walked in company with Beloved leading the pack. They shed flowers and greenery as well, so many that though Furiosa walked with bare feet, her skin hardly touched the stone. Wispy veins dripped from the hanging gardens and caught the late afternoon breezes.

Nanny and Giddy followed with a cadre of guards behind them and flanking the entire group. Furiosa scanned the guards’ faces. None of them were Reaper. She didn’t know why she thought he could help her – he’d been the one to bring her to this place after all, but she still craved a familiar face. 

As expected the three boys stood with their father while she approached. When the one she assumed was Scaborus shot his foot out too trip her, she stomped it with her heel. The young man’s eyes burned with hatred as he gritted his teeth in pain. Furiosa smiled naturally for the first time since her mother died.

Her happiness, if it could really be called that, was short lived. Immortan Joe’s eyes bore down on her with chilling satisfaction. She pulled her bouquet closer to her chest so her wrists could press against her hidden peach stone, and she held her smile still while she scanned the room for exits. She prayed the vines and leaves of the hanging garden might cling to her as she walked among them and shield her from what was to come. They were unsurprisingly not helpful. 

It all as Beloved described: the cup, the water, the Wretched, the kiss. Through it all Furiosa stood as stoicly as a mountain. She gave only the tiniest nods on her cues, and she would not smile. When she raised the cup to her mouth, she spat instead of drinking. When the ceremony ended with a kiss between immortal and wife, she shut her eyes, tightened her lips and waited behind her barrier of flesh. 

Then the others left, except for Organic and his apprentice who guarded the door in leering silence. But for the two of them, she was alone with The Immortal. He took her bouquet of corn cobs and scratchy husks and set it on a ledge before giving her another long, meandering stare. 

She instinctively folded her arms over her chest. A small, hard objected clattered on the stone floor. She sprung and scrambled after it, but the peach stone rolled away unpredictably, it's pointy end disrupting its trajectory. __Ssheh-weh, ssheh-weh. Joe’s eyes were on it now instead of her. She pulled up her trailing garments with one hand and reached with the other as she dove. __Ssheh-weh, ssheh-weh, clehnk.

Immortan Joe leaned over to get a better look at the object that had just struck his boot. “What’s this?”

Furiosa’s hand closed around the treasured pit. “A peach stone, from my mother; she always wanted to see me married,” she said for she had always been taught to camouflage a lie in truth.

“Your something borrowed?” he asked.

She wasn't sure what he meant by that, but she nodded anyway. “I'm supposed to plant it where I find happiness, and maybe it will grow there. It won't grow at home.” Her half truth had become a quarter truth.

“Maybe you can plant it here, Durable.” 

“Maybe someday. I'm still so young.” That was the biggest lie yet. She was almost surprised how easily it left her lips... almost.

His eyes were on her again, moving over her in that disconcerting way as if selecting the goat for slaughter. His mouth was slightly opened. His pale, blue eyes were framed with lines as he squinted at her, and she wondered if his age was staring to take a toll on his vision. He might have been Miss Giddy’s age if she had to guess; he looked far older, but she assumed he had seen more of the sun. He looked unremarkably human.

He limped towards her, his fingers twitching as he came closer. Furiosa swallowed to clear the fear from her throat and asked, “What is it like, being immortan?”

His eyes moved to meet her-gaze, and she held them there as he spoke. “Have you ever heard stories of super heroes? Of people who can fly, people who can be become invisible or get shot without feeling any pain?”

“No…” She knew plenty of stories of gods and goddesses, but every single one of them felt pain.

“I loved those stories when I was your age,” he continued, and with each word, the lines around his eyes and the scars on his face became more pronounced. “There’s one, a quite a famous story in fact, that includes the line, “With great power comes great responsibility. That’s what it’s like.”

Furiosa held her face still as she ran her thumbnail down the ridge in her peach stone. 

“Sometimes I wish I or my times could be ordinary, but that’s not my destiny.” He was still talking; she smiled and nodded, delaying the inevitable. “I alone hear the words of V-8 in its whirring. I alone have been gifted immortality. Because I have these powers, I have the responsibility to rebuild mankind in my image. Obviously, I can’t do that last bit on my own.” He chuckled to himself at that last bit.

Furiosa stayed silent. Could she kill him with her bare hands like she did Pala? If the two Organics left she would have a better chance. But surely there were guards outside the door. She couldn’t be the first wife to consider escape. There had to have been girls with him as long as Nanny had been. They couldn’t have all been like Beloved; they couldn’t have all been like Pala.

The Immortal was undressing, distracted with the fastenings of his clothing. She scanned the room for something she could swing at his exposed temple. But after the crack and the thud, then what? She didn’t see anything useful anyway. And what if she failed? What if she only wounded and angered him? Would he destroy them all in his wrath? One thing she knew for certain, in a short time she would be back in room with the other women if she did nothing. 

Then he stood before her in all his naked mortality and pealed away her white robes one by one. He must have noticed how she shuddered, how she looked away. “Don’t worry, my Durable,” he said as he cupped his hand around the side of her chin. His fingers lingered there, in the tender space where her jaw met her neck as he regarded her. With a self-satisfied smile, he withdrew his hand slowly, his fingers tracing Furiosa’s sharp jawline. “My little diamond.” 

She stayed her hands and gritted her teeth and started counting – a number for a breath, a breath for a number. She knew the time would pass. She just needed to be sure it didn’t leave her behind.

_one_

_two_

_three_

_four_

_five_

_…_

_one-hundred_

_one-hundred-and-one_

_one-hundred-and-two_

_…_

_one-hundred-fifty_

_one-fifty-one_

_one-fifty-two_

_…_

### The 125th Day 

“Morning,” whispered Giddy with a fragment of a smile. “I brought you breakfast. Don’t worry, it’s clean; I respect your wishes.”

Furiosa watched her from the relative safety of her bed and weighed her trust for the woman. She came up lacking. Furiosa pulled her blanket over her stinging eyes and waited for the woman to leave her to her misery.

“The others, have chosen help. They don’t want to think so much.”

“I’m not hungry.” 

“I’m sorry,” said Giddy as she set down the tray of food on the ledge. “I’m sorry you’re here, and that this is your life. If I could send you home, I would. I won’t tell you any of this is right. I won’t even tell you to make the best of it. All I’ll tell you is that I’m on your side.”

Furiosa buried her face in her pillow and muttered. “What good is being on my side if you’re useless.”

“I don’t want to be useless. What can I do to help you?”

“Unlock the door and let me out.”

“Where will you go?”

“Home.”

“How will you get there?”

“However I can.”

“And what happens if he follows you?”

Silence.

Listen, I’m as stuck her as you are. If I thought for one instant that I anything I did could help get you home, I would do it in a heartbeat, but there’s nothing. Wherever you came from, it’s better than here – I believe you, but between here and there are a lot of places far worse than either.”

“Is that supposed to change anything?”

“You won’t be here forever. All time passes eventually.”

“And then what?” she finally raised her voice. “What will be left of me?” There it was, finally spoken after so many days spent bubbling up inside her. It wasn't just the food; she could feel this place poisoning her. Her mother had told her to wait for the right moment, to wait however long was necessary, but she couldn't have meant this. She couldn't have meant counting her breaths while… that didn't happen to Vuvalini. It just didn't. Vuvlini didn’t let traitors lure them away from camp. Vuvalini didn’t need their mothers to rescue them. Vuvalini didn’t get their mothers killed in failed escape attempts. The weight of her failure was crushing. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any answers.” Miss Giddy rose to leave. “I’m doing the best I can, but that’s still not very much.” 

So Furiosa took the soup just to get the woman out if for no other reason. It was hot, scolding hot like shame. She wanted to throw the bowl across the room, to watch it crack against the wall while its steaming contents splattered. But that would just summon Giddy back. So she drank and imagined the soup cauterising her from the inside out.

Then she buried her face and soothed herself with memories of her foot into Pala’s face. What if she had struck Joe when he came to mount her? What if she’d driven her heel into his crotch? Or maybe her hand, bladed, thumb tucked… Then she’d squeeze and pull and twist, like plucking overripe berries from a brittle branch. 

Not so fast, she cautioned herself; she would have to set up for that finisher. Maybe… she dug her fingers into her bedding and drew her upper lip into a sneer of delight. She could be like her mother and wait until he was between her thighs – then plant her feet and rake her fingers across his eyes as she rolled him over. She would land with her knee in his belly; his flesh would part for her like rows of grain. Then she would plunge the point of her elbow into the soft spot between his collarbones, where his trachea sat vulnerably exposed beneath a thin layer of skin. She would let him up and smile while he struggled to his feet. Then he would watch her. His eyes all light blue and pleading, realising just how deeply he had underestimated her. She would step towards him, extend her hand and –Grab. Twist. Pull.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You've probably noticed that the Milkers aren't located between the Vault and the Mouth yet. They are relocated sometime between now and the Road War. 
> 
> I may or may not have rolled a peach stone across my kitchen floor to hear the sounds it made. My cats may or may not have helped.
> 
> The ball shearing described here is my personal favorite move of the Koryo form in Taekwondo. I let Furiosa borrow it; I figure I owe it to her.


	8. Interlude

### A Little Less than One Year Earlier

The breathy moans subsided, and the house fell back into its usual early morning quiet. Then giggles blossomed from the bedroom. Furiosa shook her head; she was old enough to know exactly what was going on even if she'd never experienced it. She was curious, but her own experimentation had yet to yield the same results. So now she thought of Valkyrie with her mass of black hair and sharp shins and how even after knowing each other all their lives, Valkyrie had recently taken to staring and blushing.

The bedroom was silent now except for the shuffling of blankets. Finally, Furiosa heard the soft patter of bare feet against the rug. “Having fun?” Furiosa asked as she looked up from the pouch she’d been mending.

Mary Jabassa snuggled up behind her. “Sure, aren’t you?” She began to playfully poke her daughter. 

Furiosa shrieked and laughed as she wriggled herself away. “Why I oughtta…” she taunted as she brandished her sewing awl.

Mary deftly avoided the tiny blade. She clicked her tongue and taunted, “Too slow.” She caught Furiosa’s hand and guided it behind the girl’s back, impinging her shoulder and twisting her wrist. 

Furiosa scoffed and wormed her way out of the lock, but not before Mary took her took the ground. 

“Woah, good morning to you too, Furiosa,” quipped K.T. From above. She jumped out of the way and landed on one foot. “Goddess Mary,” she taunted as she prodded with her free foot, “didn’t you get enough energy out already, or am I starting to lose my touch?”

“Nothing like a good ol’ graple for family bonding,” Mary shot back, her voice only slightly winded. “Care to join us?” Her voice lifted at the end when Furiosa caught hold of her ankle. “No fair, I was distracted,” she laughed as Furiosa spun on the ground to wrap her legs around her mother’s. 

“She was talking to me too,” responded Furiosa. “I just wasn’t stupid enough to answer.”

“I try to limit myself to one exertion before breakfast.,” said K.T. as she hopped over them on her way to the kitchen. 

Mary swatted at her daughter. “Hey, this is me tapping.” 

"Not until you tell me why you're in such a good mood," Furiosa said.

“K.T!” Mary pleaded with a laugh.

“Hey," K.T. shruugged, "you made her.” She took a swig of milk from a leather bladder and turned to Furiosa. “Thanks for doing the milking, by the way.”

“I can’t hold a conversation like this,” Mary muttered as she kicked herself free.”

“You seem to be doing alright,” K.T. teased. 

"I’m just happy, ok,” Mary answered. Furiosa released her foot, and Mary pulled her leg in so she could stretch and rub her foot. “Good dreams, good sex, good morning, good life…” Mary snatched the milk bladder from K.T. And took a drink. “Do you know what happened seventeen years ago today?”

Furiosa curled up beside her birth mother. “What?”

“I came here. I think back to life before, and as easy as it was, it was... well, it was empty.”

“That can’t be all,” Furiosa prodded.

"No, that's all – Call me a selfish shit all you want, but the end of the world was the best thing to ever happen to me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I use the spelling "Jabassa" for Mary's last name and "K.T." for Furiosa's initiate mother because these are the spellings used on my Blu-Ray closed captioning.
> 
> I used the homes of middle class Ancient Egyptians (as represented at Deir-el-Medina) for Vuvalini houses. They typically have one or two bedrooms, a main sitting room, a kitchen, and a storage room fit into about 75-80 sq meters depending on family size. Water jugs and food for drying are stored on roofs. Toilets are of the compositing variety and are outside of the houses. The items kept in the homes are personal property, and all food, water, livestock, and other essential items are considered communal property so they can be centrally tracked and distributed in times of need.


	9. The 126th Day

Furiosa promised herself that next time would be different, that she wouldn’t let her fear take her hostage, but when Joe came for her that evening, she proved herself unreliable. Again fear stuck in her throat. Again her body didn't spring into action the way it had been trained for so many seasons. Again she counted her breaths as they fell into a strange rhythm with the squeaking of mattress spring: two breaths per squeak. Again she told herself she had chosen not to fight back. Again she told herself she could have but that it would have ended badly. 

Then he left, maybe to go to the other room, maybe to do whatever he did when he was't there- she didn't care. She was alone on her now tainted bed. She could smell him in her sheets. 

She remembered her first night in this place and how June had taken Promise into her bed and just held her while she stared off into the void. If she were at home and she were Furiosa, she would have her mothers, and she would have Valkyrie, but here she is Durable, and Durable has no such alliances. Durable just takes hits one after another; she sits by, waiting, holding her tongue, alone and afraid. Had she fooled the mothers all these years into thinking she was Furiosa of the Vuvalini when really she was Durable the human punching bag? Is stone only solid out of fear?

So she wandered out to that spot where the Dome met the stone, where she had lurked two mornings prior, and she pressed herself skin against the glass. It wrapped around her, and she could pretend that she was floating out above the endless expanses of dust like a lonely, vengeful ghost. She watched her breath bloom into a fog and then fade. She let out another puff and was quick this time with her fingers. They wrote “FURIOSA” in frantic, conjoined letters, and when the glass was clear again, if she looked closely enough, she could still make out the grey smudges of her fingerprints. 

### 

Morning came quickly before the sun had even awoken. Frantic shouts stirred Furiosa from her sleep, and she rolled to see Giddy run across the Vault to the other big bedroom. Furiosa stretched the chill of morning from her bones and wandered back to what had been her room. It smelled of manure, rich, organic, brown, wet, foul.

“Are you sick too?” asked Promise, her hand on her belly, her face pale.

Furiosa shook her head. She looked to June who was still curled on her bed somewhere just short of sleeping.

“That’s good.” Promise flopped onto her own bed which squeaked as it received her. “Don’t want to take any attention from Beloved and the baby.” 

Furiosa inventoried her body. She was tired but not sick, at least not in the way of Promise. Sick with disgust, sick with fear, sick with anger… these were not the same. “Is it time?”

“Baby seems to think it is.” Promise’s voice was faint and flat.

Furiosa waited in her doorway while the Vault bustled with activity. First the Organic Mechanic came with his apprentice shuffling behind and sneaking peaks into the other rooms. Then a Joe came yelling with arms crossed over his medaled chest. Even though he stormed straight for Beloved’s room, his presence made his smell on the sheets and blankets of the bedroom overpowering, and Furiosa fled to the safety of the Dome glass that smelled like nothing but sun. 

Then Beloved’s shrieking started, the kind of cries that shook the belly and froze the blood. She cried for her children, both the living and the lost, and she spat feverish ravings at all who had ever wronged her. So Snow was sent out, and Corpus and Rictus were brought in. 

Snow looked even paler than usual. She shook between her thick blankets as she made her way across the Vault. Furiosa pressed herself against the wall as she shuffled past. Snow’s gaze was dull and vacant.

“Take my bed,” said Furiosa for she wanted nothing to do with it.

Before Snow could speak, Beloved cried desperately, “Where’s my daughter? I want my daughter.” Her voice echoed off the stone. 

Giddy or Nanny must have responded with something well meaning but useless because after a few seconds of quiet, Beloved exploded into a flurry of what Furiosa had to assume were obscenities. Beloved huffed and shrieked between words, and Furiosa was reminded of something called a volcano where. She remembered that stone is not solid because it is afraid but only because the heat and pressure are not yet intense enough to make it otherwise. She wanted to be magma: red, hot, and volatile.

Somewhere between the biting fire and chilling venom, Furiosa saw the one thing she wanted in the entire world. She stared. She was certain it was but a mirage: the Vault door had been left ever-so-slightly ajar in the chaos. 

Her fingers hesitated only momentarily before the cool metal. The door was just as heavy as it looked but thankfully quiet. She held her breath as she walked it open with smooth, careful steps. Then she inhaled sharply as if dunking her head under water and stepped through the opening. She let her air out slowly as she walked the door closed again, her heart chaotically thundering all the while. 

Furiosa ran. She ran without any idea where. _Down!_ Down was all she knew she wanted, and those first few steps were so glorious that direction almost didn’t matter. Her eyes watered as euphoria washed over her: Furiosa was back, and Durable was still huddled in that room with the stink of shit and fear.

 _Not that way!_ She turned away from the tempting greenery leading to the Mouth. _Not the lift either._ She had to avoid being seen. She found a metal staircase near the lift, and she plunged down it and shuddered as every step sent vibrations through the stone passageway. She looked up behind her to watch for the flood of white bodies she knew had to be coming. 

Maybe one of them would be Reaper. She didn’t know why she thought he might help her, but he was as good a hope as any. Of course she would look for her own way out, but having two plans had to be better than only having one. 

The stairs ended at a stone floor. She tried to estimate how far she’d come. She couldn’t remember coming up to the Vault in the first place. Her sense of distance was entirely dependent on her view from the Dome where the ground looked so far below. She had come in through a door about half way up the butte, but that would mean needing someone to lower the platform. She could try to find her way all the way down or she could stow away in a vehicle and wait for it to leave. She had many options, all of them wrong. _Down!_ Down was still all she knew. 

She found herself in the cavernous network inhabited by the skull army. Their white faces peered at her in disbelief from around smooth and jagged corners. She pulled the folds of her top over her head to cover her hair. At first she could slip by, almost blending in with their powdered bodies between her white garments and skin pale from months without the sun. But something in her frantic steps or her panicked breaths gave her away, and one by one the skull army let out enthusiastic shouts and started chasing her. 

She could outrun them at first, but the further she went, the more her body felt the toll of months of captivity. She felt herself fading as her lungs burned. She tipped her chin back so she could suck the thick, musky air. To make everything worse, she was having more and more difficulty distinguishing which way was down. The corridors became darker and narrower, the air foul with car fumes and human filth. 

She made a wrong turn and had to backtrack. She made another, and when the corridor dead-ended, she punched the hateful stone in frustration. She kept running.

Furiosa sucked air through her teeth while white hands clawed at her. She swatted them away, but they kept coming. None of the faces were Reaper. None of them looked at all sympathetic, just a thousand nightmarish skulls with shrieking voices and rotten teeth. There were so many of them. They knew the way, and she didn’t. They would catch her; it was only a matter of time. Maybe they had already called for reinforcements to head her off. Maybe she wouldn’t even make it that far. 

The walls were closing in around her. Her feet had grown heavy even without her boots. The heat in her chest was overwhelming.

She stumbled. She clutched the peach stone at her chest. She tripped again, this time just barely catching herself on the stone with her hand instead of with her face.

She wanted to stop. She wanted to vomit and curl up against the stone. Fever shook her bones and tangled her feet. _Just keep moving_. 

The white hands were getting better grips. It was harder now to twist herself away. Maybe they would kill her and eat her is she was lucky. The cracked mouths and yellow teeth looked awfully hungry. 

Light surrounded her. She hit it like a wall, and it knocked her to the ground. _No! Keep going._ She didn’t know if she said it out loud or just in her head, and it didn’t matter. She willed herself back to her feet, her whole body still shuddering from the impact of the stone. She looked up as a flurry of white arms enclosed her. 

Furiosa collapsed again, and this time she didn’t get up. Instead she closed her eyes. She squeezed them shut to block out the image of the sad woman in shackles with tubes curling up from her breasts.


	10. The 127th Day

Furiosa awoke to what she thought was the next morning, but she couldn’t be sure. She was back in her bed – she kicked the bundle of blankets off with disgust. She remembered running from this place, or at least she remembered trying to run. Then everything became a hazy blur of faces with one face clear and definite in the back of her mind: the goat woman. 

She'd looked down at Furiosa with vacant eyes. Her mouth and nose had been covered with fine fabric. From her breasts snaked a pair of hungry tubes, which connected to a gently humming machine. Her ankles were shackled. 

She was one of many, but hers was the face Furiosa saw through the fog of her fever. And even as her brain burned, Furiosa instantly understood. She knew now why the cheeses here tasted funny and squeaked when chewed, but more importantly, she knew there was no good life to be had after her time as a wife was done. 

Furiosa shoved herself up to sitting. The act took more effort than it should have, and she found her body frustratingly feeble. She's intact at least; her escape attempt hadn't left her with anything worse than a few bruises. The illness however, whatever had torn through the population of the Vault, had left her feeling small, shriveled, and empty. 

She rested there for a moment while she looked the room over and tried to gage the light. She hated not knowing how much time had passed. Hours? Days? The bedroom was always dim, the little lanterns only providing enough illumination to drape the room in the long shadows of perpetual twilight.

She stood up and shuffled passed the still sleeping Promise and June because she wasn't going to get any answers otherwise. She fumbled filling her cup and the trough, sent it clattering to the floor.

“Durable,” said Miss Giddy from the doorway. 

Furiosa looked up, spilling her water down her chest. She didn't know why refilling the cup and taking a long swallow felt like such defiance, but the water was cool and in that moment, more important than anything else. 

Giddy approached her in silence, her steps tentative, her eyes downcast. She waited until she was immediately beside Furiosa before she spoke. “We lost Promise and the baby. They will get a funeral tomorrow. We lost Miss Nanny as well.”

Furiosa set down her cup on the ledge and let her fingers linger there. Promise had been kind to her, deluded but kind. She knew the Vault would be colder now though she never would have thought that possible. She couldn’t claim that she would miss Nanny.

“So things will be different now,” Giddy assures her as if making something not unlike a promise. She fills her own cup and crouches beside Furiosa, “You’re lucky we found you.”

She didn't feel lucky.

“No one even knew you were ill, and there you were, delirious with fever. It made you run. You were probably overwhelmed by all the noise and stress; that’s what I told Joe. You’re too smart to have tried to run otherwise.” Giddy ran her fingers around the rim of her water cup. “I can only imagine how frightened you must have been. You were boiling hot and half mad.”

“More than half,” Furiosa muttered. “You said before that you were on my side…”

“I still am.”

“Then why…”

Miss Giddy turned the water back on at let it run as she whispered, “Right now that means reminding you that speaking freely is a luxury we don’t have at the moment. Joe’s very unhappy about the losses of the baby and Beloved; he’s looking for people to punish. He shredded Organic for his failure. His apprentice is with Snow now, giving her fluids. Little things like food poisoning used to be so easy to brush off. I never thought I would see the day when something so small could destroy us like it almost did.”

_Zhh_ \- Water flowed from the open facet and tumbled down the sloping trough and through the grate. Furiosa thought of all the white hands that had grabbed at her as she ran. “Did I spread it?”

“Oh no. It had already climbed the Citadel to get here. You girls were the last to contract it and the first to make anyone care. At least now we have Ampicillin for next time; all of you girls will be getting injections of it from the new Organic for the next nine days just in case. Joe doesn’t want to take anymore chances.” 

_Zhh_ \- The water was still rushing out. Miss Giddy placed the bucket under the tap. The sound of water hitting metal rang through the room, echoing off the stone walls. “I’m not going to tell you he cares about you for any reason other than your built-in incubator, but I am going to tell you that as bad as things are for you here, they are worse for the people below us, both those outside and inside.” She shook her head. “Maybe ‘better’ and ‘worse’ aren’t the right words. The wrongness off this place doesn’t stop at the Vault door.”

“I know,” Furiosa muttered, the Milker still fresh in her memory.

“It doesn’t stop at the base of our buttes either.” Giddy paused, searching for words. By now the bucket was overflowing, but she let the water run. “Easier, life here is easier, even for a pup no one values. When I said I’m here to help you, that I’m on your side, I meant it, and right now, being on your side means telling you that you were foolish to try and run by yourself, with no supplies, no transport, no idea where you were going!” Giddy hissed. “And if by some fucking miracle you made it home, don’t think for an instant Joe wouldn’t follow you. Where would you be leading him? What do you think would happen then?” Giddy’s eyes were wet with boiling rage. “His entire army! Your precious garden of the Goddess!” She took the bucket by the rim and tipped it so the water rushed out, and its metal rim clattered again the stone. “Sometimes with a disease the best option is quarantine.”

Miss Giddy rose as she rubbed her hands against her face. “Cut your losses where you can!” she spat as she turned away. Then she left, and the room was quiet again but for the running water and the pipes humming in the walls. 

### 

Furiosa waited a short while before wandering out to the Dome. The sun was past peak for the day, low enough to dim its brightness. The Wasteland was quiet as usual and achingly vast. She listened for even the slightest stirring of wind, but the dust was still.

She felt restlessness stir in her bones as they hungered for movement. She obliged them by trying a push-up. It was harder than she expected but still certainly doable. She pressed through another and a third, reveling in the blood rushing through her limbs and the delicious effort clawing at her muscles. Another - breath in, blood flowed, muscles moved, blood flowed, breath out. Fatigue after four? She would have laughed if it wasn’t so sad. 

Even the fatigue was delicious; she softened her arms and let it was over her like a river finally flooding. Feeling anything was delightful. She would get her strength back and then some, she promised herself. She didn’t care what Miss Giddy said; she wasn’t going to stay here to rot.

“I see you’re feeling better,” Miss Giddy said softly. “I need to do more of those myself, but…” she crouched beside Furiosa, “Lifting books all day does have its benefits.” She held out a book, “I think you’ll like this one.”

Furiosa rolled to her back. Was this Giddy’s version of an apology? She silently accepted the book and ran her fingers over its cover of supple leather. Golden lettering caught the sunlight. “The collected works of Lord Al-fred Ten-nee-son,” Furiosa read aloud.

“I’ve been fighting to keep this one for years. Nanny always thought it was useless fluff. “It will have to go eventually: all of them will. I was hoping you could help me pick a passage to commemorate it. I marked a few poems for you like “Boudicca,” and “In Memoriam.” She smiled and said wistfully, “Try not to get to caught up in all the different types of trees; there are so many trees in Tennyson.”

The book did seem like a silly waste of resources. The Mothers kept their knowledge in books yes, but nothing as fancy as this one. No leather covers – leather was for wearing. Furiosa tilted the book so the golden writing glimmered. “How did sunlight get on the book?”

“It’s gilded,” said Miss Giddy, “fitted with the thinnest possible layer of gold. Gold is so soft and pliable, it doesn’t really do anything on its own, but people used to think it was valuable, so…”

“I’ve seen gold jewelry. My mother has some from the old times.” Then Furiosa corrected herself in a whisper, "Had."

“Jewelry for books…” Miss Giddy mused, “it seems fitting. They would outlast us if only we would let them. We burnt so many of them after the Fall. I remembered stories we used to tell about other creatures from faraway planets, and I wondered what thy would think of us. If they stumbled upon us long after we we're gone, would they even know we’d ever been here? Not if we kept burning every trace of what was once beautiful about ourselves? So I snuck from place to place and stole these books from libraries and living rooms. I thought they would be safe here, but even here, even now that we have diesel and propane, they still become kindling.”

Furiosa wrinkled her nose. “My people use dried, dead plants.”

Giddy smiled. “My little refugee from Tennyson, there’s a poem, not by Tennyson but by Shelley. It’s here…” She rotated her left fore arm and pointed to a a faint, blue script on the flesh inside her elbow. “I wanted somewhere that would hurt for this one.”

Furiosa nodded; she knew about wanting pain. “Would you read it to me?” she asked.

“I don’t have to.”

Furiosa stared out at the expanse of dust the world had become as darkness swallowed the last glow of the day and Miss Giddy’s voice curled itself around the blackened hills:

> I met a traveller from an antique land  
>  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone  
>  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,  
>  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,  
>  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,  
>  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read  
>  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,  
>  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:  
>  And on the pedestal these words appear:  
>  'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:  
>  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'  
>  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay  
>  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare  
>  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was a Listeria outbreak at the Citadel, probably caused by contaminated lettuce or maybe cheese. Given the average incubation period of 21 days, the exposure happened before Furiosa started avoiding certain foods. Listeriosis is particularly dangerous during pregnancy but typically more for the mother than the child. 
> 
> It is possible for Ampicillin to still be available and usable by this time. Melbourne is still almost functional at this point, so Ampicillin and other antibiotics could still come from there, but even if all manufacturing stopped with the fall of Sydney or even Adelaide, Ampicillin has been experimentally shown to still be stable 12 years after its expiration date in a laboratory setting [source](http://thesurvivaldoctor.com/2015/08/05/expired-antibiotics/)
> 
> The Citadel does use plant matter for kindling as well. The threat of burning books is just another way that Joe maintains his power over the Vault, but he does act on the treats periodically. If he doesn't believe Giddy's rationalisation for Furiosa's escape attempt, he might burn a book as punishment. 
> 
> Miss Giddy is reciting Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias" as written in the 1826 collection, _Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley_.


	11. The 129th and 130th Days

### The 129th Day

Two days later, the women were led to the Mouth where Beloved had been laid out on a bed of leaves and her child on the underside of a car bonnet. Both were painted gleaming silver. Joe arranged his surviving wives and sons so all could see how they knelt before the corpses. 

Miss Giddy led them in a ritual where she asked Beloved and her infant son to lead them to “Have pity on us still in Mid-Gear, and lead us to Valhalla with the shine of your chrome.” 

The son called Corpus nodded in agreement as he rubbed his eyes with one hand and swatted at Rictus with the other. He muttered something to his younger brother who crossed his hands over his head and muttered, “Witness” before going back to fidgeting. Scabrous lurked in the shadows without any semblance of interest.

Then the Immortan Joe stepped before the crowds of the white army clinging to the Citadel buttes and the thirsty, wretched masses wallowing in the dust. “Look for my Beloved at the gates. Pray she finds you worthy that you may ride with Optimus, my most perfect son.” Then he jiggled the water handle so only foul, brown liquid dribbled down the mouth like dusty drool, “For this world is cruel.” Joe led his wives back from the ledge and out of view of the rabid crowd, but the desperate cries wafted up like steam.

Furiosa thought something might be said for Miss Nanny, but she remained unmentioned. Instead, Joe left his wives to receive their antibiotics from Organic while he wandered through the hanging gardens in silence. His shoulders slumped beneath the weight of his armour, and his boots scuffed against the floor.

Then Miss Giddy led her charges black to the Vault in silence, hers edgy, theirs ranging from bitter to listless to bordering on hopeful. Once the Vault door was closed behind them it stayed that way. Giddy withdrew to her room early and left the others to entertain themselves.

"The best part of death is that he leaves us alone afterwards," declared Snow. 

"That's a terrible thing to say," Promise chided her. 

"Isn't it true?" Snow demanded.

The others were quiet. Even though they all thought Snow was right, they were too ashamed, too afraid to count on it. So they waited for the inevitable turn of the lock and opening of the door. It never came, and so the night was good.

###  The 130th Day

In the morning, the women took their usual seats around the chalkboard. Two chairs sat empty, and the Vault felt infinitely larger as a result. Miss Giddy stood at the center. She tapped her fingers against the edge of the board while she scanned the room. Her students waited.

“Today, we resume _The Aeneid_ where we left off..." She gave the Vault door one last glance. "But let me be clear, I will be reading the book as it is written, not changing it the way my predecessor did.” The girls sat in silence. “First, some background information, _The Aeneid_ was written about 2100 years ago because a new leader was making changes to an old country, and he needed historical and religious validation for his rule. It was and still is…” she took a deep breath before scrawling in thick, white letters: P-R-O-P-A-G-A-N-D-A, “propaganda.” She paused, but the girls still gave no reaction. “Virgil, the author, tied the Roman Empire and its new Emperor Augustus to the Trojan War and therefore to the mythological and historical continuum of the Mediterranean. That’s what propaganda is: a work with an agenda to manipulate beliefs and opinions.”

Miss Giddy set down her chalk piece, and then as she started speaking again, she gestured furiously with both hands. “When Miss Nanny read this to you, she presented it as factual. She also skipped over the hints that Virgil left that he was writing what he was told and that he knew it was all bullshit. _Inanus_ he calls it. He sneaks that word in over and over again. Nanny glossed over it, just like she skipped over parts where gods disagreed with Aeneas or tried to impede his progress. For the Romans having tension between the gods would have just been good storytelling. They didn’t have the concept of a singular, divine will. So why do you think Nanny changed those parts? Durable?”

Furiosa hadn’t raised a hand, but she knew the answer. “Joe,” she said clearly and quietly. 

“Go on,” Giddy coaxed.

“To make Aeneas more like Joe… or to make Joe more like him.”

Giddy nodded. “But I think this work deserves to be taught unaltered.”

The girls watched, their mouths slightly agape. Furiosa looked back and forth between them and Miss Giddy. Furiosa folded her arms over her chest and furrowed her brow in a self-righteous frown. “Are you surprised?”

“Yes,” replied Snow indignantly, “surprised the changes would stop.”

“Aren’t you worried we’ll be punished?” asked June as she twisted her black hair.

“No, I’m not” declared Giddy. “Now, don’t take this to mean I’m going to be shouting all this from our doorway. I have a responsibility to you, and getting myself killed won’t help any of us.” The others nodded in agreement. “But my primary responsibility is to the truth, to preserving the heights of human accomplishment. I have dedicated my body and my life to the writings of humankind, and I will not see their words altered for anyone’s political gain.” The students nodded again. “Am I making myself clear?”

They nodded a third time. There was a palpable energy in the room, one that might even be called excitement. Furiosa looked around at the others and saw for the first time that they had not mindlessly sucked up what thy had been given but had instead held everything at a distance. They had only pretended to believe. As much as she knew they had chosen Giddy’s drugs she still had believed their listlessness to be more from idiocy than perceived necessity.

“Now,” asked Giddy, “where were we?”

“The battle for Italy,” June announced.

“Are we finally going to finish this thing?” asked Snow.

“Soon,” Giddy assured them, “But first I want to point out a character we skipped. Her name is Camilla, and she is one of the Volsci, ancient enemies of Romans. Camilla is a sworn virgin, which at the time just meant that she wasn’t married... She is a _bellatrix_ meaning warrior woman. And she is a follower of Diana, goddess of hunting, wild animals, and the wilderness.” Miss Giddy held up the book and pointed to a passage. “Here, Promise, read from line 803.”

Promise’s eyes widened as she read. She stumbled over a few phrases but the other women hung on her every word. They beamed as Camilla ran over field and river without bending a stalk or wetting her feet. Even Furiosa sat entranced by her reading but for a completely different reason.

Giddy smiled. “What stands out to you? Anyone?”

“The matrons,” said Furiosa.

“Ah,” said Giddy. “'The matrons grave stood wondering as she passed, well pleased to see her royal scarf in many a purple fold float off her shining shoulder.' Roman women wore their hair covered.”

“But what’s a matron?” Furiosa asked.

The others looked at eachother. “They’re old, married women,” said Promise as if such a concept were obvious.

Giddy nodded. “They’ve always done everything society told them to do. They were not consecrated to Diana the way Camilla was, and so she can do thinks that are off limits to them. They know she’s different from them, and that’s why they don’t judge her for letting her palla fall as she runs. The falling palla is symbolic of her dropping the pretenses of Roman society.”

Furiosa bristled at the word _palla_. It stired anger from the pit of her being and brought sweat to her skin. Class continued though without anyone giving any indication of notice. 

“I think,” said June, “they wish they could be her. I don’t think they’re jealous though, maybe just a little. More likely they’re imagining what it must be like to be able to live like that.”

Promise and Snow smiled and nodded their agreement. “Let’s read more,” said Promise. 

“Don’t get too attached to her though,” Giddy cautioned them. “Things don’t end well for her, as tends to happen to women who challenge the status quo in classic literature.”

“But what about Diana?” asked Furiosa who knew that goddess by the name of Artemis, Wandering Mother. “She survives, right? Goddesses can’t be killed, at least not permanently.”

“Don’t read to much into her existence. Goddesses were not meant to be role models for ordinary women. Remember, Lavinia is the woman Roman women were supposed to emulate, not Dido with all her desperate pining and her lascivious desires or Camilla with her non-conformity or even Amazon Queen Penthesilea, called _furens_ , raging. We skipped over her as well. _Amasenus_ , the river Camilla crosses is an allusion to Penthesilea’s Amazons because every Roman would have heard of them. There were countless stories about a tribe of warrior women who lived to the east. Their preferred weapons were bows and arrows; they were the fastest riders and the sharpest shooters. It was said that they lived without men, only meeting with them to reproduce. They worshipped..”

“Were they real?” June interrupted, her knees hugged tightly against her chest. Snow and Promise leaned in closer, their fingers twitching.

“What is real?” Giddy asked. “They influenced literature for thousands of years. They were, and as I can see from looking around this room, still are, meaningful. I think in the grand scheme of things having meaning is more important than being completely factual. Physical existence is so very brief…” She let her voice dift off almost playfully as she kept her face blank and serious. “But… that being said.." She beamed at her students. "There were several tribes who lived to the east of the Greeks and the Romans, tribes whose women fought in battles as warriors and had significantly more autonomy than women anywhere else in that ancient world than we know of.”

“I want to be an Amazon when I grow up,” June declared.

“Greek women kept pottery decorated with pictures of Amazons, sometimes fighting, sometimes hunting, sometimes dying even, but also dancing, drinking, keeping eachother company. I can’t help but think they looked at those images the same way the matrons look at Camilla. They must have thought, ‘What would my life have been like if I had been born an Amazon instead of a Greek? What would my life have been like if I’d been consecrated to Artemis or Diana?”

Giddy looked around the room at three smiling faces with dewy, dreamy eyes. One face was downcast with tears barely hidden by falling hair. Furiosa gripped her forehead, letting her too long nails dig into her too soft skin as she tried to shrink away from Giddy’s gaze. Emotion bubbled in her throat like water ready to boil. 

“Snow,” please continue from where Promise ended,” said Giddy, and the girls squealed at the introduction of Camilla’s entourage with their glamorous, exotic names while Giddy walked around the circle to approach Furiosa from behind. “Durable?”

Furiosa jolted to her feet. With a sharp kick to its underside, she sent her chair clattering to the floor. Then she forced her way past Giddy, letting her shoulders carve their own path with their angry angles. It was only then that she realised she had no where to go – not out the main door which was now always carefully locked, not to the room where she was supposed to sleep, not even to the Dome with its horrifyingly stable glass. She’d spent so many nights alone in the darkness pounding those panes, and they never budged, _never_.

So she went to Nanny’s room, and she let hands fly to every fragile thing they could reach. First the printed paintings were torn from the walls. Then the sheets and blankets were yanked from the bed, sending pillows up and the thin mattress out at an awkward angle.

Then her hands found the books. She took them by the armload from the shaky shelves and huffed and grunted as she hurled them against the walls. _Crack! Boom! Boom! Crack!_ They exploded in violent, raging chaos. They rumbled and tumbled like pumice stones thrust from the belly of the Earth. And when all the books had fallen and their last echoes had gone quiet, Furiosa's agony had not yet been extinguished. So she let out something between a howl and a roar from deep within her being and roared until she was empty. 

Furiosa's eyes fell on Giddy’s angular form silhouetted in the doorway. The woman’s eyes were wide and horrified and her mouth slack and speechless. She lingered there in stillness and silence. 

Furiosa couldn’t have felt more exposed if she’d been naked as she stood amidst the ruins she had made. Her chest heaved with panic and exhaustion. She rubbed her hands across her face as if she could wipe herself from her own skin. But Giddy kept walking forward, arms open. 

“I want to go home,” Furiosa whimpered as she buried her face into Miss Giddy’s shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Mid-Gear" comes from _Midgard_ , the realm of the living in Norse Mythology. Valhalla is also sometimes called "Hi-Gear," particularly by those who hold the belief that Valhalla is a higher reality existing in the same physical space as Mid-Gear except everything moves too quickly for the living to perceive it. The term "Lo-Gear" is used less often, but there does exist a belief that during the Fall, Mid-Gear and Low-Gear merged with Low-Gear contaminating Mid-Gear and ceasing to exist independently.
> 
> The Camilla passage referenced is _The Aeneid_ Book7 lines 803-817. The quote in English is from a translation by Theodore C. Williams as published on [Perseus Project](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0055%3Abook%3D7%3Acard%3D803).


	12. Interlude

More days passed, and Furiosa counted them as they went. She counted them again when she tried to sleep. She counted her days again when the Immortal came for her. She counted her days when her bloods came and when the Organic studied her to determine why they kept coming. She counted her days whenever time passed too slowly and she needed to be certain it would’t stop. But then as the number grew, she counted them because she needed to be certain that they wouldn’t swallow her.

### Three and a Half Years Earlier

Furiosa closed her eyes and tried to nap. The pain in her belly was calming, finally. The bladder full of warm water was helping just like K.T. said it would. But she knew the pain would return. It would crest as her muscles twisted themselves, and she would grit her teeth against the knifing, nauseating pain until it came to a trough. That is how it would go, for three whole days, and then again, every moon. Time stretched before her unfathomably. 

She’d only been alive for fifteen winters and only had eleven years’ worth of memories. She’d breathed her way through pain plenty of times before, when her sparring partners hit too hard, when she’d sprained her ankle, when she’d fallen from her bike and knocked out the first of her milk teeth… She’d even let the needles of good germs from Melbourne be stuck in her arms and her bum once she was old enough to understand. Of course, the first time the good germs came, she’d shrieked and kicked so hard that holding her down took three mothers. 

Afterwards, her birth mother sat her down and said, “Sure, the good germs hurt, but getting sick from the bad germs hurts worse. Then, after you get sick, other people get sick, and some die. Don’t you think that would hurt more than a little prick? Sometimes you need to take a little bit of pain to do a whole lot of good.”

She understood vaccines well enough, but she was having a hard time thinking of any good her cramping belly might be doing. Was her pain improving her womb for some hypothetical future baby? She saw no reason why she should hurt for the benefit of someone who didn't even exist.

K.T. walked in carrying two mugs. “Here Fury, try this,” She handed Furiosa a mug and sat beside her on the mattress. “My mama made this for me just like her mama made it for her and her grandmother before that going back as far as anyone can remember.” She smiles, her teeth bright against her dark skin. “Of course, I have to make it a little different here; we don’t have all the same plants here as we did in the States, but my family has always been a resilient, resourceful bunch. Every time we ended up somewhere new the recipe changed. So here we have have the post-apocalyptic Aussie version. You’ll probably change it to. Little by little, this here tea will conquer the world.”

“Thank you,” Furiosa mumbled. The tea tasted of caraway and ginger, sweetened with honey.

“Drink up, we got work to do. The world doesn’t stop just because you’re on the rag.”

Furiosa snickered. “Never thought it would.” She gulped the tea down, enjoying the warm trail it left down her throat.

“That-a girl.” K.T. took a drink from her own mug. 

“Is it always like this?”

“Not always,” K.T. took another sip, “but often enough that we thought to make tea for it, and it has been that way since the beginning of time. Fuck, when I first started, my mother told me I had become a woman.”

“I don’t feel any more like a woman.”

“No of course not, and I always thought it was a stupid thing to say too. I mean, I was twelve, hardly a woman by any stretch of the imagination, but now I get it, not necessarily the way she meant it, but I do see a truth to it. Men have always feared us because we can bleed for three days and not die, but they should fear us because we can suffer for three days and then do it again the next month... three days of every moon, for about thirty years, that’s 1,174 days, give or take a pregnancy or two.”

“So much pain…” She scrunched her nose. “But why?”

K.T. shrugged, “Who knows? Camps are just more of life’s shit, as if it didn’t have enough already. “But,” she raised her mug in a toast, “the time will pass; time always does.” 

Furiosa frowned and raised her mug as well. “Hope it hurries.”

“And if it’s not cramps, it’s something else because honey, everything hurts... periods, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, infertility, and that’s just the the reproductive stuff. Life hurts. You may not have suddenly become a woman the moment the floodgates between your legs opened up, but you’re definitely a step closer. You’re becoming a woman. Ask a man what men are made of, and you’ll get all sorts of wonderful answers about honour and courage and the like. Well, the recipe for women is much simpler: women are made of pain.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely stole the line "Women are made of pain," from a story that was going around on Tumblr. It's an anecdote of about a sparring session. If you know the source, please let me know, and I will cite. Update: [I found it!](http://twinkletwinkleyoulittlefuck.tumblr.com/post/113587505358/so-i-used-to-be-a-martial-artist)


	13. The 501st Day

The morning began like any other. Jennifer Gideon rose at dawn, retrieved her radio from its hiding place and turned It on as she had done so many other days before. She let the static play while she checked the berries he had been fermenting to later make into medications. She set the radio to a different channel, and the same grey noise filled her room like a low lying fog while she planned her lessons on _A Canticle for Leibovitz._. She thumbed through the yellowed pages as she absentmindedly hummed along to the tuneless sound.

She turned to:

> But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.

She sighed as she read. Such brilliant foresight her ancestors possessed… If they had only known how the power of their words would give her the strength to face her day... She’d decided long ago that despair would be too easy, but even worse than that, despair would mean that _he_ had won. Colonel Joe Moore had taken everything from her, everything except for her books and the dignity and moral purpose they gave her. Sometimes though... sometimes tht just wasn't enough.

Then the static stopped. Silence interrupted her thoughts interrupted her thoughts, pure silence. Jennifer held her breath. Then a voice began:

> "At 0637 this morning… a series of atomic weapons were detonated in and around the last populated sectors of city of Melbourne. It is believed that we were caught in the last remnants of the North World War. Melbourne is now uninhabitable. We are no more. May the Commonwealth of Australia rest in peace, and may God have mercy on us all. Over and out."

Silence followed, then static again. She found herself shaking to it, giving it a pulse as if it were something other than the nothingness that preceded that universe and would certainly outlast it as well. 

She had known this day was coming. It was relieving in a way, like the last breath of a long death. She found herself reminded of Hemingway. There was an exchange in _The Sun Also Rises_ : “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” How did the world end? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. The same could be said for so very many things.

She thought that somehow she would feel differently, like her life would change in a instant, palpable way, but she could hardly remember her life in the cities as anything more than the words other people used to think she should use to describe it: crowded, loud, busy… vibrant. She couldn't decide if she really missed it or if she only missed the idea of it, an idea that was never really hers. 

Jennifer toasted Melbourne with a sample pipette of the ethanol she had been making. The clear liquid wasn’t quite ready, but it burned her throat enough to counteract the surreal texture of the day. That’s what she needed; to know that something, that anything was real. 

And so the morning crept forward. Jennifer centered herself within her decorated skin and slipped on Giddy like a mask before floating out of her room. Even the air felt thicker, as if she were wearing a second skin between her own and the morning. 

She emerged later than usual, which the girls seemed to notice immediately. They were creatures of habit out of necessity. Predictability masqueraded as control. They didn't mention the change directly, but they watched as if they knew something was different. It reminded her of cats and how they used to mill about in obvious interest whenever she was packing for a trip.

“We’re running a bit behind, as you know. We’ll be skipping our exercise session today,” she announced. The girls murmured but said nothing. She had meant to dive in, to deliver the message right then and there, no hesitation, but the words that came to mind were borrowed:

>   
>  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,  
>  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,  
>  To the last syllable of recorded time;  
>  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools  
>  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

She had their attention. She could have dropped that proverbial pin, and it's fall would have echoed off the walls. She took a long, slow breath and then read from the slate she held in her hands: “At 0637 this morning…”

So there it was - the news was out, free to move about the room. It hadn't felt quite real when it was just a secret she knew. Someone somewhere in the world had to have heard it - she couldn't be the only one left who still listens. 

Silence followed her words - no gasps, no cries or even muted exclamations. She watched the girls' blank faces. Did they understand? Did they care? 

"That cesspit!" scoffed Snow with her arms folded across her chest. "Good riddance."

Rage boiled deeply in Jennifer, far beneath her Giddy exterior. Pulling herself up to her full height, she roared, "Listen you spoiled shit. What you think of that place doesn't matter. What matters is that is was the last, and it's gone. Our last link to the world that was is gone.”

She watched, waited for their faces to reflect the gravity of her words. Some of these girls had to remember cities and comforts and the Old World. Canberra had only fallen ten years earlier, Sydney only sixteen. Most of these girls were easily into their twenties. They had to remember, had to care. 

But mostly they just bristled at her anger. They walled themselves up behind defensive postures and bitter countenances. Some may have come from earlier falling cities; others may have even spent their whole lives in the country. Or maybe none of that was important. Maybe the length of time mattered less than the way it had been spent.

Except for Durable, her face lit up with understanding, with the excitement of a new hypothesis ripe for testing. “How do you know? Who told you?”

Giddy paused, carefully weighing her words. The radio was meant to be secret, but she has no other explanation for her new knowledge. She knew she should have formed an answer earlier. Her girls were smart; she should have seen this coming. 

She shuffled, gathering her wits and her will. “I have a radio," she admitted. "You mustn't tell anyone. Joe can't know about it because he has forbidden them here. He didn't want us knowing there was anywhere left; he wants us to think this is all there is.”

“What's a radio?” Promise asked.

“A talking box,” said Snow. “Like a phone.”

June chimed in. “What's a phone?”

“Another type of talking box but better,” Snow declared proudly. “People carried them around in their pockets. They were full of information; told you everything you needed to know.”

Giddy folded her arms authoritatively, but she smiled warmly. “The information wasn't in the phone. It was all around you like an invisible library. The phone just allowed you to tap into it. But then when the power shut off…”

“My mother used to still carry hers around,” said Snow, “just in case the power came back.”

“Tell us more about old world magic. Why did it stop?” pleaded Promise. 

“It wasn't magic exactly,” Giddy corrected. “It was science. Everything is still there. We've just forgotten how to use them.”

“How do you forget that you have magic” June asked. 

Giddy decided not to correct her. “Because when you’re scared and hungry and thirsty, you don’t have any energy left for magic. And then when you don’t use it for days, those days become years. Then you’re cold on a winter night, and you need something to burn. And then that book is gone, and with it everything in it, like it never existed in the first place.” She looked at them each in turn. “But they did exist, and we have evidence. Those cars the Warboys worship, people made those. And we made so much more.”

So Giddy returned to her room and dug through her piles of books, past the poetry, underneath the history to find her most sacred and secret text. She ran her fingers over the slick cover and then pressed the book to her chest. Her heart pounded against it, and if she closed her eyes she could pretend she was scavenging again, that her husband and daughter were waiting in her getaway car just outside the sand-filled house. She felt, in a word, efficacious. 

She spent the day detailing Old World magic, and by dinner time the girls knew the basics of physics and communications. They knew that sound travelled in waves and that light was both a particle and a wave, like sand mumbling down a dune behind a departing boot. They knew they spent their days and nights among those waves, sometimes moving beside them or through them, sometime making them, waves of sound, waves of heat, waves of light. But more importantly, they learned those waves could be harnessed and made to share all that was good in the world.

### 

“Miss Giddy?” Durable asked from the doorway.

Giddy looked up from braiding her hair. “Yes? You can come in.”

The girl was brilliantly awake, present in a way Giddy had never seen her. “Your talking box… can you send messages?”

“Yes…” Giddy answered cautiously. “But it isn't very strong. The message won't go very far, and I can't control who hears it.”

“I understand,” said Durable, meeting her gaze unwaveringly.

“Do you really? Don’t think for an instant that Joe is obeying his own ban.”

“I’ll be vague,” Durable promises. “I have to try. I don’t belong here, Giddy.”

Giddy looked away. “No one belongs here.”

“No, this is different,” Durable protested. “Some people were born here. Some came by their own will. Some, like you, have important work to do here. Most have nowhere else to go. None of these apply to me. I have a family. I have a home where I am missed. They need to know that I’m still alive.”

“Sit down, Durable.” Giddy as she patted her bed. “What good will it do to give them hope if you never make it back to them.”

“Wouldn’t you want to know?" Durable asked, still standing in some small measure of defiance. "I know I would.”

Giddy frowned. She did want to know. She would give anything to know. “And you want me to risk our only connection to the outside for that? If Joe or any of his people hear the message and can pin it to us, they will come take the radio.”

“What good is a connection if we don’t use it?”

“Exactly, we need to be able to keep listening. The man in Melbourne will no longer broadcast, but there may be others.”

“I know there are,” Durable insisted. “My people have a talking box, a radio. They listen.” Her eyes were grey and dark in the low light; they reminded Giddy of something called a 'mood ring' with the way they subtly changed hue. “Please, Jennifer. I’ve never asked for anything, and I’ll never ask for anything again. I’ll be good. I’ll pay attention during lessons. I’ll be kind to the others. I’ll even…”

Giddy didn’t want to hear the end of that promise; se didn't want to know what this proud girl was willing to give. “Do you know what you’ll say?”

Durable nodded, firstly slowly then vigorously. “I do.” 

“Do you want to practice?”

“I have already,” she looked down as her eyes moistened, “I do every night.” Then she swallowed and looked and looked up again, her mouth held in the closest thing to a smile Giddy had ever seen her wear. “I’m ready to do it now.”

Durable’s – no, _Furiosa’s_ excitement was palpable and contagious. Giddy’s own hands shook as she twisted a finial off of her bed post. Her breath caught in her throat as she plucked the key from inside. It wasn’t the danger of the situation that set her on edge. No, this was pure and simple excitement that she was not only opening the compartment behind her bookshelf but that she was also opening her most unreachable charge. She’d seen the girl lock herself away or break down with fear and sorrow, and she’d seen her burst with rage worthy of her true name, but that smile.. that single, almost smile… if there really was any good left in the world…

“Thank you,” said Furiosa when Jennifer showed her where to push while she was speaking. 

Jennifer nodded because what does one say in such a moment? She settled on “Good luck,” and she squeezed Furiosa’s shoulder. Both exhaled simultaneously, and then static filled the room as if it were a continuation of their breath.

 _Cick_. “I am one of the Vuvalini, of the many mothers. My Initiate Mother is K.T. Concannon. I am the daughter of Mary Jabassa. My clan is Swaddle Dog. I am a prisoner in the west, but I will use what you taught me. I will fight my way home.” 

“Say ‘over,’ when you’re finished,” Jennifer whispered.

“Over.” 

"And out."

"And out."

The two waited in silence. Jennifer imagined her words flying in waves over the deserts, the mountains, the flats, and the dunes. She wished she could do the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last story chapter of this part. Thank you for riding along, next stop: Part 3, in which Furiosa teams up with her fellow wives to attempt an escape. 
> 
>  
> 
> Furiosa at about 19 is the youngest of the group.


	14. The 614th Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally posted as the first chapter of Part III. I changed my mind. Part II will now contain Furiosa's entire time as a wife.

_I sing of Mother Hecate, whisperer of secrets,_  
_Planter of seeds in soils both sand and black._  
_In her initiated maiden began deepest stirrings_  
_Beneath many layers long-still and long-settled._

### The 614th Day

Joe came for Furiosa three nights out of ever twenty-eight. She still counted her breaths, but by now she had found that she could follow them like a trail into the darkest corners of herself. She would hide there, and outside her body would be still and quiet as a corpse while he would mutter things about how much he loved _his_ Durable as he buried his face into her neck. Thankfully, she didn't usually dream very much those nights. She would wander out to the Dome and stare out until the sky lit up with morning or her consciousness left her, whichever came first.

She grew used to having nightmares when she did sleep. At first she would thrash and cry out. She didn’t realise she was doing it until she found Promise leaning over her looking strangely concerned.

One night she dreamt her mother was with her, and K.T. came to rescue them by digging a tunnel under the Citadel. While they were crawling out, the Warboys caught up to them. They grabbed Mary from behind, first by her legs, then by her waist, and finally by her shoulders. Furiosa spun on her knee and flung a hard, fast, panicked kick at the nearest Warboy skull. A blindingly sharp pain in her foot awoke her, and she had to spend the next entirely too many days secretly nursing a broken toe. 

So she trained herself to lie still and quiet lest she wake everyone and draw attention to herself. She’d always found it easier to sleep curled up with her face to the wall so she could pretend to be as alone as she felt. From their it wasn’t difficult to train herself to stay still. She locked herself in, like a prey animal so vulnerable in its sleep it couldn’t risk its presence being known. 

Other nights she would dream of home and her mothers and peace. She would be sleeping calmly and comfortably, and then she would wake up in the sleeping room of her old, mudbrick house. She would open her eyes to see her mother’s face slack with sleep with K.T’s lean, brown arm draped over her chest. Their tangled masses of dark curls would intertwine on the pillow, K.T’s tightly coiled and springy, Mary’s wild and frizzy. 

After waking from one of those dreams, Furiosa wouldn’t move. She would squeeze her eyes shut as she desperately clung to the dream though it would be rapidly fading from her memory. She would try to conjure her mothers’ scents and curse herself for never paying enough attention to them. She would cry sometimes because no matter how long she waited, she could never find her way back into the dream. 

Those mornings and the days that followed were the worst. She didn't wanted to get up, not even for exercises even though they were her favorite part of her day. But if she didn’t drag herself out of bed, everyone would think she was sick, and she didn’t need that attention. So drag herself she would, not just out of bed but through the day, stumbling and tumbling as though she were in a fog. She would find little ways to touch the peach stone she kept tucked against her breast in the folds of her top while her mind drifted home to her vineyards and orchards.

It was on one of those days that a new wife was brought to the Vault. She was beautiful, of course physically as they all were, but her eyes burned like dark flames on hot coals, and her teeth we're sharp. Her skin was dark like K.T’s but a ruddier shade.

The new bride called herself Rani. She said the word proudly with her round chin held high and her dark eyes drilling into each face around her one by one. “Rani” didn’t sound like a name the Immortan Joe would select, and they all knew it. He named them for cutesy things or their most obvious characteristic. Snow was snow for the pallor of her coloring. Promis was promise for her good nature. June was June for the best month of the year. Furiosa was Durable for her hard stares and stoney silences. No one knew why Miss Giddy was Giddy. 

“What did he name you?” June asked as she twisted her slick, black hair.

“It doesn’t matter,” Rani declared, her voice full of pride and fire. “ I’m not his to name.” 

No one could argue with that, but the new girl didn't seem ready to yield their attention quite yet. So they asked her questions – Where was she born? Alice Springs. How old was she? Twenty-two summers. What did she like to do? Hunt, wrestle with her cousins, make arrowheads..

Rani told them how she was “mistress of many cooees" and how she had fed her people with the many kangaroos she had hunted. She told them of the men she had killed as well and how she had drained their blood for soup. 

“Then how did you end up here?” asked Furiosa, her patience even thinner than usual. She was bitter at anything that demanded her attention. 

"I traded myself," Rani declared proudly. “I knew I would fare better than any of my sisters.”

Furiosa smirked at Rani’s stupidity. No one fared well here, except for Beloved, but she still died anyway. Her bed sat empty nearly 500 days later. That Rani was being placed in the third bed of that room, the one that had always sat empty. This must have meant Beloved was still missed though no one ever spoke of her except for Rictus when he and Corpus came for lessons. No, _faring well_ hadn’t helped Beloved.

No, Rani would not fare well at all. She was all haughty posture and vitriol. Furiosa could see it in her eyes as she looked over her new sister wives with scorn and spite as if somehow they were responsible for her situation. 

The first night Rani spent with them was Promise’s night for a visit. She took Giddy’s drugs, and the other girls powdered her tawny skin to ghostly white and painted her mouth and braided her hair while they waited for the drugs to take effect. Then once she was hazy and pliable, she let Joe lead her into her own room while all the other wives went to Snow and Rani’s room to wait as far from his grunts as they could get. Miss Giddy hid in her own room as usual; no one knew what she did when Joe came. June hummed to herself to keep herself from crying. Snow sat on her bed and pretended to read a book. Furiosa went to Beloved’s bed to see if it still smelled like her: it did, but she wasn’t sure if she was only imagining the scent.

“How can you all just let this happen?” Rani demanded.

“Give it time, you’ll understand,” snapped Snow with an icy glower true to her name. 

“One of the first wives tried to stop him,” said June peering up through her eyelashes. “She came from behind grabbed him by the hair. He broke both her arms and stole her teeth, all of them. She had to eat mush for the rest of her life.”

“He keeps guards outside the door,” explained Furiosa. “They can hear through the vents.”

“But it’s wrong!” Rani protested. She stormed towards the doorway. 

Furiosa grabbed her by the arm as she went by. “Everything’s wrong.” She tightened her grip when Rani started to squirm away. “Don’t be stupid.”

Rani growled as she worked herself free, “Don’t be complacent,” but it was clear that she wasn’t going to try anything just yet. She sighed, letting her arms drip from her shoulders.

Furiosa thought of herself when she first came, how different things had been, and how little will she had left to care about anything. All she wanted was for someone to tell her the truth she already knew, that the wound on the back of her neck was nothing she brought with her and certainly was no accident, that the gaps in her memory were not the result of a concussion several days prior, that they had no right to take her clothes and cut her hair or do any of the other things they had done while she slept from the drugs they had snuck into her. Giddy had given her that truth, and then when the haze of her new life finally cleared enough for Furiosa’s anger to burn, she’d lashed out at any one within reach, but never Joe. As much as she wanted to, as much as she fantasised about tearing and ripping through his soft flesh so his blood and gore ran down her fingers, she never dared.

Furiosa envied Rani her passion. Her own had now lain dormant so long she almost forgot it was there. She remembered that in Grandmother Fang’s stories of the Skywalker family with their flying cars and weapons made of light, Grandfather Yoda said, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering,” but he had never said anything about the overwhelming exhaustion along the way. Furiosa had feared and angered and most definitely hated, but more than anything else, she waited, too worn and frayed to sleep or do really anything other than wait for time to pass. The problem with fire is and always has been that eventually you run out of things to burn.

Maybe that’s why she was always so impatient with everyone else around her. She snapped her answers during Giddy’s lessons, and she still picked at her food even though Giddy promised it was clean. She would sit by the curve of the Dome of atop the stairs to nowhere and glower from behind her knees at anyone who paid any attention to her. Sometimes she would exercise, and sometimes she would read stories of adventure and revenge and then daydream about them.

She would imagine that Shai-Hulud would come sliding over the dunes to smite the Citadel. He would open his round mouth with a thousand concentric rows of fangs and suck everyone down the lengths of his great belly. Then he would smack himself against the stone buttes, and they would topple one by one until the stone skull smashed its mouth into the earth. Then he would slip back under the sand and back into Giddy's books.

And here was Rani, ready and willing to hurl herself blindly into chaos, or so she said... Now Rani was looking just as forlorn as the rest of them. So Furiosa inhaled deeply so her lifted chest pressed against her peach stone, and she met Rani’s tired eyes. “You’re right." She weighed her words carefully. "I don't know how much Miss Giddy told you, but whatever doubts you have, whatever your instincts are telling you, they are right too. This whole place is wrong."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In trying to decide what stories would be part of the Men's Tribe mythology, I looked for stories in modern and traditional mythologies that portrayed men in ways that would harmonise with Vuvalini ideals as well as stories that would transition well to a post-apocalyptic setting. I chose _The Lord of the Rings_ , _Star Wars_ , and _Doctor Who_ from modern mythologies for their emphasis on compassion, teamwork, hope, and stewardship while each maintaining an adventurous, and in their own way apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic setting. 
> 
> I don't mean that the Vuvalini preserved them exactly as we know them. Vuvalini culture, and by extension, Men's Tribe culture is oral in many ways. They are literate, but writing is used primarily to send messages, negotiate trade agreements, or to keep inventories. Stories, however, are performed rather than read so they can stay flexible. 
> 
> This should go without saying, but Shai-Hulu is from Frank Herbert's _Dune_. In case you can't tell. Furiosa loves the fuck out of this book.


	15. The 615th and 620th Days

### The 615th Day

The next morning came as usual: exercises then breakfast then a lesson on history. After that, when they girls were settled in for a literature lesson, Rictus and Corpus arrived. The princes were between tutors, their last having finally succumbed to one malady or another. So their father would come to the Vault every two or three days to read with their step-mothers. 

Miss Giddy obviously needed to adapt her lesson for them, to sneak her messages instead of emphasising them. She had chosen _The Lord of the Rings_ books for the entire group to read. They would move forward with the story one day, and then the next time the princes came, Miss Giddy would lead them in discussions about various topics, mostly about friendship or loyalty or diversity, but sometimes about the stories tucked away in the books’ appendices or even about the languages invited just for these books.

The day they discussed languages, Rictus worked himself into a tizzy chanting, “Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,” while he ran in a circle until he stumbled in a fit of giggles. He landed on Promise, who couldn't have been more delighted. He certainly did have the most fun that day. 

Furiosa, however was even grumpier than usual. She sat in her usual spot beside Corpus with her arms folded and her brow furrowed. She didn't see the point of learning other languages that weren't even real. She was also probably more than a little bitter about skirting the limits of her own literacy - so many made up words and lists of names and other nonsense. She'd skipped over all that stuff in _Dune_ except for a few special words that fit in her mouth especially nicely, like "Muad'Dib" and "Shai-Hulud," that she was probably mispronouncing anyway, but no one else heard them so that didn't matter.

"Yes, Durable?" Miss Giddy finally asked when she'd probably had enough of Furiosa's sour demeanour.

"This is stupid."

"And why is that?"

"I know this story; it's a good story. We should just keep going without the stupid, fake languages." 

Miss Giddy had answered simply, “Every language is a different perspective. I have yet to meet a person with too many perspectives.”

Furiosa’s father used to like to tell the Ring stories when the men’s tribe came back from their wanderings. He started telling them just to her, but then Valkyrie and her brother joined and brought their parents, and by the time the Fellowship had formed, the stories had become fireside entertainment for the entire clan. He ended up telling the stories many times over the years; sometimes the clan’s children would shout their favourite lines, and everyone knew all the songs. Furiosa would sometimes be walking to the river to refill family’s water jugs she would hear people humming or singing, “And the road goes ever on and on… down from the door where it began.” while they worked. 

The stories in Giddy’s books were a little different; Furiosa grumbled in protest when not Arwen but some other elf rescued Frodo from the Wraiths. “That’s not how the story goes,” she said to Corpus beside her but loud enough for everyone else to hear.

Miss Giddy frowned before saying, “Ohh,” as her memory returned, “that was what happened in the movie.”

“What’s a movie?” Promise asked. 

“Pictures that move so you can watch the story instead of reading it,” said Giddy, ‘or while you read it if the story is being told in a different language.”

“Dad told me about those,” Corpus declared smugly. “They rot your brain.”

“Is that what happened to Rictus?” Snow asked with a snicker. 

"Snow, don't be cruel," Giddy scolded, hardly looking away from the chart of Elvish languages she was drawing on the blackboard. 

“What’s it like to live that long?” Promised mused when Miss Giddy gave the Elrond's age.

“Let’s talk about that,” said Giddy as she set down her chalk and abandoned her language chart. “Obviously there’s no one around we can really ask, but we can extrapolate. In the Old World when people kept pet dogs and cats, they would read this and think about how they lived maybe five or six times the lifespan of their pets. They would watch pet after pet come and go…”

“Like the half-lives,” said Corpus. “We cycle through them so quickly.”

"Do you have any half-life friends?" asked Giddy, obviously familiar with the concept.

"What's the use?" answered Corpus. "They just go and die on you."

Miss Giddy grimaced then shook her head. "Because they're still people; they need friends just like you do."

Corpus scoffed defensively and looked to Furiosa, whom he trusted to be just as bitter and jaded as he was. She did not disappoint. She chuckled to herself behind her glower and picked at her too long nails." 

“Do you ever feel like an elf?” asked Promise, “I mean, how you watch us come and go…”

Miss Giddy shifted uncomfortably, and Furiosa imagined the lines of young women reaching out from all of them – into the past, into the future. Beloved stood behind Rani and then in front of her, in front of all of them, a line of faceless women in white.

“No,” Giddy finally said in a guarded tone, and then she elaborated, “There are no Grey Havens for me.” Then she gathered herself, “But really, how can any of us truly know what it is like to be anyone other than ourselves? I will never know what it is to be a prince of the Citadel. I can imagine, but I can never… What's it like to be Promise or Snow? How about June? Durable? Rani? You live such similar lives at this specific moment in time, but you are each the culmination of so many different moments...”

But Furiosa’s mind was wondering: what was it like to be Rani hunting kangaroo in the yellow grasslands? Were the grasses tall enough to brush her shins and tickle her calves as she rode? Did their scent work its way into her skin and her hair the way that Furiosa’s own fingers used to sell like soil after a day in the low gardens? Did the sun and exertion make her cheeks glimmer and glow?

Rani folded her arms and then met Furiosa’s gaze. Her stare was unwavering and bizarrely calm for one who had just caught an onlooker. Then she went back to picking invisible dirt from beneath her fingernails, dirt that most certainly wouldn’t smell rich with nutrients. Rani didn’t seem to mind the attention; she held her mouth in a certain, soft smirk that almost seemed to indicate that she enjoyed it.

So when evening came, and it was Furiosa’s turn for a _visit_ , when Joe pressed her into her sheets, she let her mind wander back to those yellow grasslands with kangaroos hiding behind rocky outcropping on the rolling hills. She thought of her own bike and how its handlebars fit perfectly in her curled hands. She would ride with her mother’s rifle strapped to her back. Then, when she was in range, she would cut her engine and nestle her rifle’s butt against her shoulder. Her finger would glide into the trigger well and squeeze with one gentle motion. Then the sulfurous smell of gunpowder would fill her nose as she moved in to claim her prey. 

It was a new fantasy in the details but not in its entirety; somehow, her prey always turned into Joe. 

 

### The 620th Day

Rani never asked Furiosa for permission to join her for extra exercises or even announced her presence. One day, she simply declared her presence with the weight of her feet on Furiosa’s back during a set of push-ups. The only reason Furiosa didn't shift into a defensive gear was because Rani was quite noisy about it.

"Don't mind me," Rani teased as Furiosa twisted to see her lounging against the wall with her legs extended towards and atop Furiosa. Grunting from the extra weight, Furiosa turned again towards the ground and finished her set. "You're welcome," Rani chirped as she swung her legs back the floor. "My turn?"

"Fine." Furiosa assumed Rani's previous position and lowered her feet onto the new wife’s broad, dark back. She took a certain joy in the act of placing her feet on the white wifecloth. They weren't dirty enough to leave any smudges, but she could always imagine.

Rani pumped out three clean push-ups, and then, as she glided into her fourth, she said, "I'm going to get out of here." She finished her fourth and then her fifth in silence before adding, "and I want you to come with me."

Furiosa leaned forward, placing more of her weight onto Rani's back and whispered skeptically, "How do you suppose you'll do that?"

“I’ll find a way,” Rani responded, her voice full of naïve certainty. “But I know he’ll never get to bed me. I’ll wring his neck before I let him touch me.” Her muscles move smoothly beneath Furiosa’s heels.

"Did it ever occur to you that you might not be the first to try to escape? If it were so easy wouldn’t we have done it already?” Furiosa’s voice is sharp like her heels as she presses them into Rani’s back. 

“I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe… secretly…”Rani finished her set and bent her legs, shifting her weight back so she could stretch. She looked up briefly to meet Furiosa’s eyes. “Maybe you like it here.”

Rani’s words stung exactly as Furiosa knew they were intended to. Furiosa turned away, avoiding her presumptuous co-wife’s eyes, and then she rolled to her back so she could feel her belly working to angrily scrunch her muscles together. She filled the silence with ragged breaths before finally hissing, “Why are you telling me then?” 

“I like you, Durable. You’re smart. You’re quiet. You like a good challenge. You don’t deserve to be here.”

Furiosa recognised the flattery for what it was. “No one deserves to be here,” she responded. It sounded like something Giddy would say. “But quiet, imagine that…” She hoped Rani would understand her meaning. Approaching things this way seemed too reckless. 

“I just need to know that I can trust you.”

“A little late for that, don’t you think?” Furiosa was still doing her sit-ups and enjoying the burn they created in her centre.

Rani wrapped her feet so her insteps pressed against Furiosa’s ankles. “No,” said Rani as their faces met at the top of the crunch, “ I don’t care who knows I’m getting out. I just need to know I can trust you to help me.”

“You should care,” Furiosa whispered, “ You don’t know who would tell him.”

"You wouldn't."

“You don’t know me.”

“I’m a good judge of character.”

Furiosa narrowed her eyes and shushed her, “Remember, the air vents.”

Rani shook her head. “Miss Giddy said we’re hermetically sealed.” Furiosa frowned. “It means no air goes in or out so the outside world can't contaminate us. That's why she can teach us what she does.”

"But the girl who tried to run... the guards heard her through the vents…”

Rani shrugged. “I guess we've been upgraded since then… probably didn't even tell you when it happened. I mean, why would he?”

“He still places guards by the door when he’s here,” Furiosa said, still not willing to lift her voice above a whisper. “ _Imperators_ he calls them. They follow him everywhere, except inside with us.” She let her gaze shift to the glass behind Rani’s and tried to will herself to tell Rani what she knew, of the maze outside their door, of the passages that led through the army of skull children and finished where women were kept as livestock. “Say you get lucky and you kill him, then what?” she finally hissed. “How will you get out? Where will you go? How will you get there?”

“I didn't say I had a complete plan.”

“Well you need one, with contingencies, and I won’t help you if your plan is shit.”

Rani smiled. “So that's not a direct refusal…”

“But it's close.”

“You’ve run before, haven't you?” Rani asked, finally lowering her voice as she pressed her elbows into the flesh around her knees to force her bent legs flat.

Furiosa rolled to her belly and arched her back in a long stretch. “I'm still here.”

“And you've still got your teeth.”

“For the time being.” Furiosa rolled her shoulders back, lengthening her stretch. “I’d like to keep them.”

“Help me make the plan then,” Rani pleaded. “You've been here longer; you know more about this place.”

“Don't tell Promise anything; she's too soft and gentle to be any use in a fight. Don't tell Snow either; she takes Giddy's drugs so she can lose herself before Joe comes for her. Who knows what she whispers in his ears…”

“And June?”

"I'm not sure. She's quiet; that's something.” Furiosa opened her legs, reached between them, and sunk her weight into her hips. “Just keep quiet for now. Giddy will get suspicious. She knows more than you think.” She glanced towards the centre of the Vault. “See,” she's already noticed us.

“That's because you're always by yourself. Here.” She repositioned herself behind Furiosa so she could press her weight into Furiosa’s back. 

Rani's sandstone-coloured fingers glided just inside Furiosa’s peripheral vision. Her breath caught in her throat when they brushed her skin and smoothed down a stray, brown curl. Furiosa’s cheeks burned, and she twitched, paralysed by her duelling instincts.

“Promise and June, they are together, right?”

Furiosa nodded, dreading where the conversation was headed. “I don't think Giddy would believe I was actually with someone.” She looks towards Giddy again and notes the softly surprised expression on the woman’s face. 

“You sure about that?” Rani huffed in a voice so very much like the on K.T. would use to tease Mary.

“I know I wouldn't.” Furiosa pulled her legs together so she could stand. She folded her arms and walked away without another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quentin Kenihan said in an interview that Corpus and Furiosa "grew up" together. This is one way I could chronologically make that work. I plan on exploring their relationship more through this and my other Fury Road fics. I feel like they have a lot of things in common, not the lest of which being that they are intellectual peers, and the idea that thy've known each other for a long time goes a long way towards explaining why he's still around to make trouble in the comics.


	16. The 648th Day and a Memory

It was evening, Snow’s night for a visit, and her moaning echoed throughout the Vault. Her voice shifted from deep rumblings to high shrieks and back again. Maybe someone told her he liked his girls wild and howling; maybe that's just the way she was, and nothing could change it. Or. Maybe, maybe she just needed something she could control, and her own voice was the only thing left.

Everything else was silent. That’s how it was every time _he_ visited her. The others would try to ignore her as best they could, and when they couldn’t they would find other inocuous ways to fight back the sounds, maybe stack books or bounce on the own beds. Furiosa's favorite was to turn on the tap and listen to the water run through the trough carved into the stone. 

"Durable." Furiosa felt a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to focus on the sound of running water. She imagined it tumbling from the Citadel Mouth into the awaiting crowd. “Durable, are you awake?”

She wished she weren’t. “What?” she grumbled without rolling over or looking up.

Then the hand withdrew, and she heard June shifting in her bed. “I’m sorry to bother you,” said June, and then she was quiet; Furiosa waited, hoping for her to draw herself back to her own space, but the silence was just June's breath caught in her throat. “But… is it true?”

Furiosa took her pillow and bent it around her head. “Is what true?”

June began tentatively, “Rani said…” 

“Rani lies.” 

“Maybe,” June murmured, and she slid across the narrow gap between their mattresses. “But if this isn’t a lie…” 

"It is."

She draped her arm over Furiosa’s shoulder. “ _If_ it isn't, I want to go with you.”

Furiosa jerked up and rolled to her back, mostly shedding June in the process. “What did she tell you?”

June caught herself with a hand on the brass headboard and eased her feet to the floor. “So it isn’t a lie?”

"What did she tell you?” Furiosa hissed again. She pulled her knees to her chest so she was crouching. 

Snow’s moans were clearer now without the pillow wrapped around her head. They filled the silence that hovered between the two girls. Then June sniffed and that silence broke as well, but several more seconds that felt like ages passed before June spoke. 

“She said she going to get out,” June whispered, her pale face parting her slick hair like moonlight through a pair of curtains. “She said you were going to help her.” Her voice broke as she spoke, and she sniffed again before tucking her hair behind her ear. Then everything she'd been holding back came through. “I can’t take it here any more. I need to be somewhere, anywhere other than here, no where even. I’d rather die than stay here being rutted. I will die if I stay, in childbirth like Beloved.” 

“It’s not a lie,” Furiosa admitted, her mind racing as it shuffled through her entire vocabulary for the right word. “But it’s not going to happen through. It’s a game, a fantasy.” 

June stared up at her from the space between the beds. Her dark eyes widened and then narrowed “I don’t believe you.”

“Believe whatever you want. I want to get out as much as you do, but it's not going to happen. I’m not going to risk…”

“Then you don’t want to get out as much as I do,” June spat back before Furiosa could finish. "I am willing to risk; I'm willing to risk everything I have, everything I don't have, everything I could have."

Furiosa sighed and let her exhale carry down to her back as she curled into herself. “What about Promise? Would you leave her?” She hoped Snow’s screaming and panting were directly in Joe’s ear. She hoped Miss Giddy was running some experiment or tested ring some drug and that Promise wasn't just pretending to be asleep.

June braced herself with one elbow on the side of each bed and let her head droop between her shoulders. “No. She doesn’t understand.”

“Have you said anything to her?”

June shook her head. “I just know she wouldn’t." She sighed then said, "Her parents sold her to him…”

Furiosa had never thought to ask any of the others how they came to this place. It wasn’t just that she had decided not to care; the possibility of caring never occurred to her. Her own misery had been more than enough, and no one volunteered her story, not even Miss Giddy, and so Furiosa didn’t either. There was no point, no reason in wondering. She couldn’t trust anyone with the knowledge that her people held a place that was still green… but Rani spoke of yellow grass that reached to her knees and sometimes higher.

“How did you get here?” She asked June, maybe because she was curious but mostly because she wanted a distraction. Any topic of conversation would be better than destroying themselves with hope for escape. 

“I was scavenging on my own. My parents were dead, and I was starving, not much older than 4,000 days. I stumbled into a camp following the scent of cooking food. His Boys were there. They fed me until I thought I would burst. I don't mean that as a figure of speech; I was sick because my body had forgotten What food was. When morning came they packed up camp and left, taking me with them; I didn’t even think to fight. I thought they were taking pity on me, and maybe they were; they brought me here.” She chuckled to herself. “I was so stupid. All I could think about was the food. I didn't c are what Joe or anyone else did to me so long as I never had to be that hungry again.”

Furiosa knew she should say something, something other than a cold reminder that if June ever made it out and into the wastes, she would be _that_ hungry again. No, Furiosa knew the story was meant as a trade. And she tried to speak- she really did, but every word got stuck in her throat. She almost envied Snow and her wild screams for how free she could let her mouth and lungs be.

"My people," she began, "have many tells - stories of the past and of the future, stories of brave and kind women and men finding their bravery and their kindness while every evil of the world conspired to keep them cruel and cowardly." She knew she could not give her own tell; it was too harsh, too real, too raw, and too unfinished.

Her eyes met June's and the two turned to face each other, their legs dangling off the sides of their beds, their knees brushing. June leaned in, "Go on..." she whispered. 

"No one was as fast as Atalanta - whether on two wheels, four, or just her own legs, she was born to move. While her parents tried to teach her to be calm and ladylike, she would escape to the open desert and let it move through her hair as she moved through it. She was wild and bold and beautiful with eyes eyes of fire and bones of steal and flesh of stone like the red canyons.

"Atalanta's family wanted her to marry, but she would have none. Eventually she and her family agreed she would only marry a man who could defeat her in a race. So her parents spread word of her skills, and her legend grew, even saying that she had been raised by beasts before her parents found her, which was why they could not tame her. 

"Men came from far and wide to prove their skills and masculinity by besting the wild Atalanta. All failed. Some men were faster on their feet, others faster on two wheels, and still other faster on four, but no one was faster than Atalanta at all three, and per her agreement with her father, punishment for failure was death. In this way she kept herself and her family fed and strong.

"But one day among her suitors was a small and dark boy, still beardless. He introduced himself as Hippomenes and was polite and kind while the others were rude and boastful. He watched Atalanta with a quiet concern that chilled her skin and churned her belly.

"The night before the race, Hippomenes slipped an apple to Atalanta. It was brilliant red with a green leaf still attached to its stem. 'I'm not here to marry you," he said. "Or to rescue you. I'm here to offer you a place with people like you.'

She turned the apple over in her hands in disbelief before replying coldly, "You know the rules. Whether marriage is your goal or not, none who has not bested me may leave this place alive.'

"Hippomenes nodded. 'I understand. I respect your consistency. I will see you tomorrow.'

"'May the road be wise,' she said as was the custom of her people. Then she tried to hand him back the apple.

"'Keep it,' he insisted. 'I have many.'"

June's eyes glimmered as she listened. By now, hers and Furiosa's knees were touching, and Furiosa hadn't noticed, let alone minded. "An apple is..."

"Fruit, like our berries here but crisp and bright."

"Why didn't she keep the fruit?"

Furiosa shrugged. "I suspect she was too proud." Though Furiosa suspected she could have stopped there while June's mind wander and fantasised of fruit, she continued "The next morning, all the tribe came out to watch Atalanta and her suitors race. There were six racers in all that day, more than some days, less than others. The first leg of the race was the footrace, and no one was able to pass Atalanta. She glided over the familiar ground without stirring a stone while het suitors tripped and tumbled. The last two men to reach their bikes were eliminated.

"Then the bike race came, and again no one was able to overtake her, but as the leg of the race was ending, Hippomenes threw an apple in her path. She slowed just enough for Hippomenes to pull ever so slightly ahead as she watched the gleaming fruit tumble, this one yellow as the sun. Then she gritted her teeth and sped up as Hippomenes leaned from his bike to throw another fruit. As he bent the wind lifted his scarf and opened his shirt. A peach - a different fruit all pale orange and juicy under a fuzzy skin - fell and bounced onto Atalanta's thigh as she saw the binding that held Hippomenes' breasts. Her surprise did not prevent her from overtaking her adversary, however. She fanged ahead and crossed the finish line first and ran to her car. Again, the last two competitors were immediately eliminated. 

"This left only Atalanta and Hippomenes competing in the last leg of the race. Both drove mightily, and the spectators cheered as they feasted on the fallen. Atalanta and Hippomenes both drove daringly, cutting sharp turns and making bold jumps as their cars danced along the road. Each one took a turn in the lead until the last leg when Atalanta fanged her way ahead. Then she looked back, and her heart ached with the knowledge that her victory and continued freedom would mean death for Hippomenes. 

"As they prepared to round the final bend, Hippomenes dropped one more apple, this one with lush, green skin. It rolled into Atalanta’s path as boldly and brilliantly as a shooting star. Atalanta watched as it came to a stop, and then, with perfect decisiveness, she released her accelerator and turned her wheel. She waited for Hippomenes to pull ahead, and then she followed across the finish line, passed her family, and all the way to the land of plentiful fruit.

June hummed her satisfaction then asked, "Have you ever eaten fruit like in the story? Does it really exist?"

Furiosa sighed and nodded. "I think so." And her eyes and mouth became wet as she thought of biting into a ripe peach and letting the juices run down her chin. She thought of dried peaches and canned peaches and peaches in tarts and ciders and wines. She nodded again and said nothing, just curled herself up in her bed.

June did the same. She didn't know that she had just been given more words than Furiosa had spoken in the last almost two years combined, and that's just the way Furiosa liked it; she had no interest in being thanked.


	17. The 703rd Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're hitting a patch of extra triggers chapters, this one for miscarriage and pelvic exam.

### Five Years Earlier

Furiosa’s palms were moist against the handles of her bike. She flexed them, first one and then the other, forcing out tension with first subconscious and then deliberate movements. She squinted through her goggles against the sun's glare. The gap in the trail loomed open, hungry. The striations in the stone beckoned with their dazzling reds and oranges. The gap was wider and deeper than any she had yet attempted. Did she have enough distance to build up the necessary momentum? Would the wind disrupt her trajectory?

"I know it's bigger than you're used to," said K.T, strong and proud as she shielded her eyes with her hand and looked out over the jagged edge. "Sometimes, you won't be able to plan your route. Sometimes, even the best plans need to change." She smiled and adjusted her goggles. "Sometimes, you just have to fang it."

Furiosa swallowed hard, her throat suddenly dry. If she made a mistake... if she miscalculated in the slightest...

"Trust yourself girl. Listen to your body; it knows what to do. The Goddess is in your bones, your blood, your muscles." K.T.'s voice danced with excitement. "When you practice, she carves pathways through you, like wind through a rock. Do something enough times, and you'll never forget. So when you need your skills, you just find those pathways again. It's like how you learn to find your way through your house in the dark, but even better because even if you end up in a new situation, the Protecting Mother will help you chose your way. You don't need to think because you already know. Just let the Goddess move in you."

K.T reached from her own bike and touched her initiate's shoulder before adjusting her own helmet. 

Furiosa nodded. She had heard the same speech or some variation of it a thousand times throughout her education. She still wasn't exactly how it worked. Was the Goddess making her heart pound through her chest? 'Of course,' her Birth Mother would say, 'that's why you can calm it.' In and out - the Nurturing Mother took the air from her lungs to ignite the fuel stored in her body. In and out - the Soothing Mother softened her heartbeat and calmed her hands. Then the Scolding Mother pushed, and the Protecting Mother guarded as Furiosa and K.T. soared across the gap to safety.

### The 703rd Day

No one mentioned running again for many days after, which was perfectly fine with Furiosa. She’d found her rhythm long ago, and she didn’t need any new upstart ruining it with whispers of an escape that would never happen. Yes, she did promise her Birth Mother she would come home, but she also promised she wouldn’t get herself killed stupidly, running just for the sake of running. She promised she would actually get home.

Rani still came to her sometimes, still tried to stroke her hair and pet her cheeks the way Promise and June touched each other, and Furiosa still pulled away. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t like the touches. Maybe they reminded her of her mothers or of Valkyrie, or of Pala, or even of Joe. The reasons didn't matter. Today, just like every other time it happened, she felt herself clamping shut like the door to the Vault. 

"Don't," she finally snapped, as if her body language had’t made her intentions clear enough, but this morning her patience was shallower than most. Her blood was coming; it churned deep in her belly. 

"Please," said Rani, "just play along."

“Are you really just playing?” Furiosa asked, not that she thought Rani’s answer actually mattered.

Rani folded her arms. "I don’t know about _just_ , because if we are going to get out of here, I need you to feel comfortable with me.”

“No.” She could not imagine feeling anything close to _comfortable_. “I need to be able to leave you. After we get out, if we get out, I’m going home.” The word felt savage and strange in her mouth. “To my home, you’ll have to find yours on your own.”

“That was never in question,” Rani assured her. After a pause, she probed, “What was your home like?”

“Is, you mean, _is_.”

“Green.” The word clawed at her throat as she forced it out, like it had twisted vines and thorns of its own and it were clinging to her, as if once out in the world it would be torn away by the wind.

“Greener than here?”

Furiosa nodded. “Greener.” 

“How long have you been gone?”

“About 700 days, I think.” She didn’t think, she knew.

“Long enough, don’t you think?”

Any hope for opening Furiosa closed then. She jolted herself away and shut herself tighter than the peach stone. She couldn’t handle this now; she couldn’t even think. She gritted her teeth against the gripping of pliers at her insides and the twinge in her chest left by Rani's probing.

“Will you at least exercise with me?”

“Not today.” Making it through the group exercises would be challenge enough. Pain tangled with exhaustion. She felt heavy.

“But I’ve made progress. I need to tell you my plans. We need to get out before he takes me. He said ‘soon,’ and I’m not like you, Durable; I can’t just close my eyes and pretend I’m somewhere else. I can already smell him everywhere, on the beds, the sheets, on you, on… ”

Furiosa closed her eyes as she waited out another cramp. “Not today.” It came out jagged and sharp but not as forceful as she’d intended.

“Durable…”

“It’s nothing. Just my monthlies.” 

Rani nodded and looked as if she wanted to speak, but she remained silent. Then Rani finally walked away to join the others as they mingled awaiting morning exercises, leaving Furiosa to herself. She scooted against the wall and sat with her back against the cool stone and her palm pressed against the softest part of her belly. She exhaled slowly through pursed lips. She tried not to think of home, but the words of the Mothers moved in her. _This too shall pass. Everything hurts. Women are made of pain._.

Furiosa sucked and gulped the air during aerobics, but she survived, and she didn’t think she drew any extra attention. This made her proud, and that, along with her stirring endorphins, helped her along. Push-ups were easy enough, tiring, but tolerable. Abdominal exercises, however, made her guts twist and torque like she was being torn in two. She had to rest. She lied with her back on the floor and her eyes closed. 

“Is everything alright?” asked Miss Giddy.

Furiosa hadn’t noticed her watching. “Nothing really, just cramps.” The red behind her eyes darkened, and then she felt a hand on her forehead. She swatted it away with a grunt. “Monthlies.”

“When did you last bleed?”

Furiosa finally caved in and rolled to her side, leaving a puddle of blood behind. She’d bled through her rags already. “Don’t know.” She did know. She fell into understanding as if it were a pit in the ground.

“Promise, send for the Organic.”

She heard murmurs of, “Strike,” echoing around the room.

“No,” said Furiosa, and then she jerked upright. “It’s better now. I just needed a rest.”

Miss Giddy shook her head. “Ten days, we’ll tell him you last bled ten days ago, a little sparse a little short, but ten days ago. Do you think you can stick to that story?”

Furiosa nodded, not out of agreement but out of understanding. “I didn’t know,” which was true. She’d never really thought of her body in _that way. Pregnancies happened to women, not frightened girls. “He doesn’t have to know either,” she protested as she tugged Miss Giddy’s skirt._

“I’m sorry, Durable. You need to be examined. We need to make sure nothing is left inside.” 

Her words struck Furiosa as being especially apt. _Nothing left inside_. She certainly felt empty, empty and weak. She pulled her knees to her chest and glared over them like some kind of frightened animal. She’d never felt so small and helpless as she did then, sitting in a growing puddle of her own blood. Powerlessness hurt more than anything in her body.

“If you keep your story straight, you won't be punished.” 

She wasn't afraid of being punished. She wasn't sure what she was afraid of exactly, maybe that Organic would find a way to fix her so that the sprog would stick, that then her belly would eat away at her as it swelled. Furiosa thought of Beloved screaming for her daughter while a new sprog was torn from her still-born, and how she only became quiet when all her blood had drained out of her.

For the first time in hundreds of days, Furiosa prayed. She thanked the Reaping Mother for making this decision for her even before she knew she had one to make. She asked the Goddess to be just as considerate and decisive should there be a next time. She knew there would be – as long as she stayed here.

Miss Giddy’s hands were on Furiosa’s shoulders, her touch gentle but firm. “Let’s move somewhere more comfortable.”

“I'm fine,” Furiosa protested, and she shrugged away from Giddy’s touch as she stood to prove it. Sure, she was a bit woozy, but nothing she couldn't fang her way through, and compared to how she'd been earlier, this was a massive improvement.

“Here you go,” said Giddy, unfazed that her attempts to help had been spurned. She gestured to one of the folding chairs. “It'll be over soon, like nothing ever happened.”

June handed Furiosa a mug of water, and it felt pleasantly warm against her skin. She had felt colder lately, not that winter ever did make it inside the Vault, but she saw the days shortening, the sunlight weakening. Her body filled in the rest. If her calculations were correct, it was the month of Hecate. No, tomorrow would start Hecate; today was the last day of Hercules, the month of blood sacrifices, and it seemed fitting that Reaping Mother Kali had chosen this day.

The lock on the Vault door disengaged, jolting her out of her contemplation. She curled herself tightly in the chair at the clanging of a metal gurney being rushed over the stone. The Organic Mechanic walked behind it, pushing it as he went, and Joe walked behind him, looking bizarrely nervous… worried even.

The idea made her nauseous with disgust and then rage. How dare he feel worried about her when he was the one who did this to her. She adjusted herself so she was crouching, and as she peered over the lip of the mug in her hands, she felt so deliciously tempted. She almost smiled at the image of him jumping back from the scalding liquid.

Unfortunately. Joe never stepped into range. Organic took the mug from her, swung her onto the gurney, and ordered her into his stirrups. He lightly bound her wrists and hardly warmed the spreader. “Yup, miscarriage,” he said and clicked his thick tongue, and he adjusted his mirrors so Joe could see in. “Cervix is still open.”

“How did we miss this?” Joe asked to anyone and everyone.

“We didn’t know. She just bled,” Miss Giddy insisted. “Will she be alright?”

“Was early,” Organic concurred, “No fetal parts.”

“Ten days ago,” said Furiosa softy. “I bled ten days ago.”

Organic shrugged. “Could have started then – could have mistook the blood for her menses.” He ran a gloved finger over Furiosa’s abdomen. “Considering how little her belly still is… and the little puddle she made, I’d say about fifty-five days."

“What went wrong?” asked Joe.

“It’s her first one. Could have been anything really, the girl, the sprog, the exercise…"

Joe’s eyes narrowed which, combined with the black paint he’d taken to wearing, made them seem to almost disappear into shadow. “The exercise?”

Organic shrugged again. “Could have been too much.” 

“No,” Furiosa insisted, squirming in the stirrups. “I’ve felt sick all morning. It couldn’t have been that.”

"All the daily exercise?” Organic offered, only half acknowledging that his charge had spoken.

Joe hummed as he ran his own hand over Furiosa’s stomach, pressing down to feel the depth of her flesh. “Don’t worry, my little Durable. We’ll try again.”

Furiosa pulled lightly against her restraints to remind herself of their presence. Joe leaned back a little, letting his belly relax forward into the perfect kicking target, and Furiosa was sure she would need only a little time to work a foot loose. Then she could swing herself and torque her hips so her heal buried itself. Or even better, he would turn, and she would land on the curve of his spine. Even better - she could almost hear it cracking.

“Tone down the aerobics,” he said to Miss Giddy, “and get all this clean-up. We wouldn't want anyone slipping and falling.” Then the men left, taking their equipment with them.

“Are you alright?” asked Giddy as she untied Furiosa’s wrists.

“Fine.” Furiosa fought back the urge to spit in the woman’s face. Instead she tugged her feet out of the stirrups. They didn't come free has quickly as she had imagined, which stung in its own way. "Fine," she said again, and she went to the centre pool to wash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spreader = speculum
> 
> The Vuvalini year has 13 months, each with 28 days, and named after a form of the Goddess or God. Imbolc, the Vuvalini new year, is not considered part of any month, and every 4 years, an additional day is added here.


	18. The 710th Day

_I sing of the Anger of the Goddess,_  
_How it grew to a boil_  
_In the caldron of her belly,_  
_How like acid it blackened_  
_And burned both the frailest of skin_  
_And the strongest of steel._  


### The 710th Day

Joe left Furiosa alone for a time. After another inspection, Organic declared that she would not be fit to breed until after she had bled again. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard such good news: twenty-eight days of peace. She still had to face Joe when he came in the evenings, but those visits were tolerable because she knew they were not for her. 

Still, the thought of another pregnancy breathed life into a fire she thought had long gone out. She would leave: she wanted it so badly she could smell it. She spent her free moments day dreaming about it, about wind in her hair and dust on her feet and the stubborn scrub just outside of home scratching at her shins. As she let the fantasies wash over her, she probed them for ways to coax them into reality. She would turn them over in her mind examining them for places where she might hitch her hope. She day dreamed during her meals, during her exercises, during her lessons, every free moment she had.

“Hey, Durable. He moved up my date,” Rani hissed as their faces met for partner sit-ups one. Then they moved apart as Furiosa’s feet hooked around Rani’s strong, solid calves like vines around tree trunks. The girls' backs unfurled against the floor. “Ten days from now,” and then at the next apex: “I need to get out before then.”

Furiosa gritted her teeth against her spine grinding itself into the floor. This was when she felt the most real, and though Joe meant to take it from her, Miss Giddy at least allowed her this small rebellion. Of course, she neither expected nor required Giddy’s approval, but having to hide the form of this work as well as its content would have made everything even more difficult. 

“We’ll leave when everything is ready, no sooner,” Furiosa promised when their faces met again.

“It’s not my fault that you’ve only just now started caring,” Rani snapped, her words darting like a lizard with a grey and scarred tail.

“It’s not about faults. Reality is what it is. We need a way out, transportation, directions, food, water, weapons…” Furiosa ticked off their requirements, each lack looming more ominously than the last.

“I’ll take his throat between my forearms and squeeze until he’s dead.” Although Rani kept her voice low, it swelled with want.

As delicious as the fantasy sounded, getting lost in it would be counter-productive. "Then how do we get out? The door will be locked, and will be guards.”

“What if we climb out? I’m good at climbing.”

“It's a long way down. Using what?”

“The bed sheets?”

Furiosa bit her lip in concentration; it could work. “We would have to make our rope quickly, only using the sheets from whatever room he doesn't visit one night.”

“Or my night. He’ll take me in the Vault, right? And no one else that night – all the sheets would be free.”

“We would need everyone in on it,” Furiosa mused before stopping and sitting up fully. “You would do that?”

“If it means getting out.” Rani spoke as if her position were obvious, as if anyone else would make the same choice.

That meant there was a lot of work that needed to be done in ten days, so many questions not yet considered, yet alone answered. Inspiration came in an unexpected place. The Citadel princes still came to the Vault for lessons every other day, and Miss Giddy still saved her moved exciting material for those days. After finishing the first book of _The Lord of the Rings_ the group moved onto _The Two Towers_. There, they met the Rohirim. 

When the had Vuvalini told these stories, Furiosa had always imagined the Rohirim as riding motorcycles, but in the book, their mounts were clearly brumbies. The other girls were just as shocked to learn the the _horses_ Amazons used to ride were actually brumbies. Miss Giddy sighed and told them to pick partners; each group was to select a historical topic to research from the books. Of course there weren’t really Elves or Hobbits, but each of these creatures had mythological heritages, and Miss Giddy didn’t want her students mistakenly believing that castles or swords were just as imaginary.

Of course, Rani wanted to partner with Furiosa, but she refused. A research project was the perfect opportunity to work on their plan, but if they worked together, they could only do half as much research as if they worked on different topics. Of course they needed to be careful, but that was a given in all things.

Furiosa and Corpus had developed a certain understanding of each other, the kind that can only exist between a pair of young misanthropes, and so she selected him for her parented in hopes that she might tap into some of his knowledge of the Citadel outside the Vault. They shared an interest in the weapons and warfare of the book. They moved through discussions of the various weapons in the books, from glowing swords to trebuchets and siege towers. And there, Furiosa found her opportunity.

"What if it ever happened here?” she asked, doing her best to feign innocent curiosity. "Do we have tunnels out like the Helm’s Deep tower?" 

"No, no one can get in here," Corpus insisted, only momentarily glancing up from a drawing of a battering ram.

"Your father did."

"He was chosen."

"And does that mean no one else can be?" She bent the corner of a page back and forth between her fingers as she spoke.

"No one's getting in," he said again adamently to cover her wavering faith.

"That's what they said about the Hornburg. I just want to know that, just in case, we would be safe. You know if anyone did come in, they would come after you first and us next. They'd want a fresh start, a new line, wouldn't take any chances." She drummed her fingers on the floor. “I wish my faith were stronger, but I’ve lived outside; I know known the men out there, how they treat people like me…” She looked up to meet his gaze. “People like…” she let her voice quiver as it trailed off, as she turned her attention back to her book. 

"We have a back door," he offered. 

"We do? Are you sure?"

He nodded. "But I don't know where it leads."

"What good is an unknown escape route?"

"It goes along the water, I know that much; there's one tunnel down from each tower. I’ve only followed ours into the Mouth, never any farther."

She fought back the joy threatening to show on her face. "Of course the Boys will ride out to meet them."

"Them?"

"Whomever. But us, where do we go? How do we get to the tunnels?"

"We follow the wastewater. I can ask Dad for more details." 

She paused then, not sure if she should be satisfied yet, and then she added to assuage his suspicions, "The book just got me worried is all, but don't tell hill him it was me. I don't want Miss Giddy getting in trouble for frightening us."

He nodded, and she studied his face for clues to his thoughts as he said, “No, you’re right. We need a solid escape plan.” He turned his mouth thoughtfully before saying, “I can say it’s for the project.”

She nodded back without looking up; she couldn't let him see how her mouth was twitching into a smile.

 

### 

"Durable?" Furiosa turned away from her view of the desert at dusk to see Miss Giddy approaching. "Can you help me with something?"

"What?” she asked flatly, annoyed that her thoughts had been interrupted.

Giddy studied her face as she spoke. "A mark actually, in a place I can't reach."

Furiosa glanced around the room briefly. Everyone else looked equally idle. "Why me?" she asked, suspicious that Giddy wanted her alone so she could ask questions.

"I've seen you doodle. I think you would be good at it."

Furiosa had never thought much about the scrolling lines she drew almost automatically around her classwork. Filling empty spaces with leaves and vines was what all her people did - ears would listen, hands move, the mind and the world both grew. She never realised that other people didn't do this until she came here where her fellow captives were uncomfortably still. At first they were obnoxiously interested, but eventually they shrugged it off as just another of her quirks. As time passed, she felt their stillness creeping into her, but it never quieted her restlessness; instead, the two battled for control over her. She was painfully aware her fidgeting would get her nowhere. The curling vines on her chalkboard were always doomed to be returned to white powder.

"So what do you say?"

"You want me to draw something?" Furiosa traced a circle with her finger on the glass. "What?"

"Famous buildings. I have pictures."

"Now? Shouldn't I practice first?" 

"If you want. I also have words in queue, but I don't mind if your lines are shaky or you dig in too deeply. That's kind of the point." 

Furiosa nodded, first tentatively than definitively. She thought of the tattoos on her mothers. K.T. had chosen a bird for her Vuvalini mark, a bird that was mostly beak and tail with its feathers trailing down her arm. She had others, scrolling vines, trees with dangling moss, and something called an alligator on her foot, drawn when she lived on the other side of the world. Mary only wore one, a spider behind her left ear that only showed when she swept up her curls and bundled them on top of her head. Furiosa always found that fitting - how it seemed to creep among her loose and dangling strands as if they were her web. 

"Alright. Show me how. I'll do it, if you let me use the talking box again."

Giddy's eyes went cold, and Furiosa was afraid she asked too much, but Giddy relented unusually quickly, "I suppose that's fair." 

Miss Giddy's room was even more cluttered than the last time she'd been there. Stacks of books had grown taller and wider, some now topped with glass bottles of various liquids. Furiosa could barely pick out the talking box's hiding place against the wall, but it's still there, waiting to carry her words into the void.

Giddy pulled the curtain shut behind them. "How are you?" she asked as she arranged a series of needles and inkpots on a stack of books. "Sometimes..." She lit a candle and blew out the match. "You never know how losing a baby will affect you, even a baby you never knew."

"Fine," said Furiosa. "I haven't even thought about it," which was mostly true - she'd been thinking about the next baby, the one that could hurt her in ways this one luckily hadn't. 

Giddy passed the needles through the candle flame one by one. "And physically?"

"Fine," she again, which was absolutely true. She'd felt the best she had since she'd come here; she was being left alone. 

"That's good." Giddy took the needles, bound them to a rod, and then dipped the needles into an inkpot. Then she turned up her left hand. "You have to poke the ink under the skin, like this." She tapped the skin of the inside of her wrist so tiny, black dots were left behind, one for each needle in the bunch.

Furiosa nodded. "I know. We did it the same way at home.” Except a motor did the tapping, not because the Mothers wanted the process to be easier, but because they wanted to feel the universe vibrating in their bones. “I’ve never done it though."

"Oh, would you like something on you? I'm sure we can make it small and hide it somewhere he'll never look. It can just be our secret."

"No..." As much as having a secret mark was tempting, her first tattoo belonged to her people. At least it needed to be special, chosen with care and earned with courage. “No,” she said again hoping Miss Giddy wouldn't ask the reason for her refusal.

But Giddy didn’t seem to mind. Maybe she just assumed she was afraid. “Just let me know if you ever change your mind.” She opened a book to a marked page. “Let’s start with this one. Maybe… here.” She pointed to a blank space on the back of her right arm. She curled herself on the floor on her left side and then patted the spot beside her, which was a bit redundant as that was the only empty spot left on the floor.

Furiosa obeyed, and then Miss Giddy moved her greying hair out of the way before extending her right arm across Furiosa’s lap. “This picture here?” Furiosa asked as she lifted the book to get a better view of the desert scene of three piles of rubble with an odd figure, half animal, half human, lounging before them.” The light would be better under the Dome, even after the sun finished setting. 

“Mm-hmm. They should be easier than words even, just three simple triangles.”

“And the statue?”

“You mean the Sphinx. That can wait until you’ve had more practice.”

“That’s not a Sphinx; Sphinxes have wings and breasts,” Furiosa corrected her.”

“Sometime they do,” Miss Giddy sighed as she settled more deeply into the floor. “Just tap away.”

So Furiosa did. Her first few taps were too soft, hardly leaving behind any ink, and the next few were too hard, making Giddy wince and bleed, but she eventually found the right amount of force. In and out, in and out, the needles glided while she held Miss Giddy’s skin taunt with her other hand. 

“This is how much I trust you, Furiosa," Giddy sighed with a clench in her jaw and a crack in her voice. "I just wish you would trust me back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brumbies are feral horses.


	19. Interlude

### A little more than five and a half years earlier

K.T. came early in the morning for Furiosa. She met her at the front of her house with two net bags on her arms and led her through the village, past the fields and orchards, to the vineyards. Out there the land was drier, the soil sandy and pale compared with the rich riverbed full of rice and flax crops. The soil had been piled into sloping rows so the grapevines could grow on top with defined paths between them.

Furiosa had been K.T.'s initiate for about sixty days now, and they spent about a third of her mornings together. K.T. would come for her, and after exchanging niceties with her birth mother. Then K.T. would whisk Furiosa off for private instruction. Some mornings they would work fight techniques, others healing. Some days they would shoot, and other days K.T. taught her to conquer a man without using a single bullet. 

Furiosa was on edge this morning, suspicious that they went to the vineyards instead this of the practice field, medicine stores, or any other place they could have gone; she wondered if she had done something wrong and this was punishment. She stood behind K.T. who started plucking the leaves from the vines and placed them into one of the fine, net bags. She handed the other to Furiosa wordlessly. 

This was a child's chore, not something to waste the time of someone of K.T.'s rank and skill. Furiosa followed her mentor's lead, pulling off the leaves one by one like she had done as a child. The foliage was thick and full, rich and dark, the sign of strong, healthy plants thriving. The vines seemed almost strong enough to stand on their own, their supports getting lost in the swirling green. Their crops would be good this year, barring any massive change of fortune.

K.T. turned a leaf in her hands, running her fingers over its edge as she said, "Did anyone ever tell you why we do this, why we take the leaves?"

"To make sarma?" Furiosa answered, only momentarily looking up from her own harvest.

"I wouldn't say that's the why, more of a bonus." K.T. shoved the leaf in her bag. "We keep the plants for their grapes." Furiosa nodded. "And grapes are fruit." Furiosa nodded again, more impatiently this time. "And plants, like us, have to use their resources wisely." Furiosa wrinkled her face in confusion. "OK, let me back up. In the autumn we harvest the grapes and prune the vines. In the winter the vines are dormant. When spring comes, they bleed water from their old wounds. Then they can start to grow again. Obviously if they don't get enough water after that they shrivel up and die, but too much is bad too - they mold and die. If they get just the right amount, they grow full, lush foliage like this, but _this_ is not what we are after. Nope,” K.T. chuckled to herself as if reminded of a joke. 

Furiosa looked up when she felt the weight of K.T.’s eyes on her. She met her gaze and promptly dropped the leaf she'd been rolling between her fingers into her bag.

“Coddled vines do not good grapes make,” K.T. continued. “We have to trick them, control them, give them just enough water that they don't dry up but never so much that they can take it for granted and make nothing but fluffy leaves. That makes them grow more grapes, but even then, they still don't give us the ratio we want. So we do exactly what we are doing right now; we take some leaves so the plants’ resources to go to the grapes instead." 

Furiosa shuffled her feet as she moved down the line, one plant to the next. The work seemed more efficient this way, collecting leaves from all the plants at the same level then retracing her path lower, working down all the plant together. 

"Furiosa,” K.T. called after her. “Being an initiate mother is a lot like tending a vineyard, and growing grapes for wine is a lot like raising a girl. Do you understand? Your birth mother, she wants to take care of you. My job is to make things harder for you, to challenge you."

Furiosa gave K.T. a determined smile as she shoved another handful of leaves into her bag. She wanted nothing more than to impress the Mothers. "Challenge me.”

“Oh, believe me, that's what I'm gonna fuckin’ do…” K.T. slipped her own full bag onto her shoulder. “But it's nice to have your approval. Finish up; today we're going trading. I don’t believe you've ever been.”

Furiosa wasn't sure she understood why going trading would be sure a big deal. “I've traded before,” she protested. She'd gone with the Mothers to set the clan’s barter goods for roaming tribes in the far hills and watched her clan’s leaders argue over whether or not the goods offered in return were sufficient.

“Ah, not like this, Fury, not like this.”

### 

So they took K.T.'s bike to the edge of Vuvalini territory where they met Valkyrie and her initiate mother Shannian. They loaded up as the waited for until two Vuvalini and their initiates rode out to join them from the neighbouring clan of Drop Bear. Furiosa vaguely knew the two new pairs from gatherings. The leader of that group was a small and sharp woman named Dolores Stroke who laughed loudly all the time and spent her festivals drinking, smoking, and dancing with abandon. Her initiate was a few years older than Furiosa, a practical girl with freckles named Tilly Devine who had wandered into the Green Place with her mother when she was small before the clans spread out. Next came Mags, who never said much but always brought the best honeycomb bites, with her initiate Shakti who was small, dark, and feisty. They all touched their foreheads together in greeting and then nibbled Mags’s honeycomb bites while making their final preparations for the ride.

"Stay close," said K.T., her voice unusually sharp. "Hold tight as we ride and keep with me after." She holstered her last pistol at her thigh and double checked the security of the straps. “Don’t wander.”

Then they road towards the eastern range of mountains with the last of the cities beyond them. The land first reclaimed itself from the sand and turned into hills. The hills hardened and sharpened shortly after. The sky, the ground, the stone, everything was greyer here. The air was thick with humidity, not the kind that turned to rain, the kind that choked the sky. Furiosa wondered if the smog she had heard so much about was finally making its way over the mountains from the cities. 

They heard the sounds of the market, the rumblings of feet and voices and rolling vehicles, before they rounded the last hill before it and saw the collection of Before buildings nestled against the mountains. The buildings themselves were in ruins, but outside, in the streets that ran between them, were makeshift stalls in a swirling mass of dust and colour, tents patched together in every fabric and pattern. The smell came next, the rich odours of livestock, feasts, and all manner of other wealth lofted out of the market. 

Dolores slowed her bike until the others caught us to her, and then as a group, they approached the guards positioned outside the market. She dismounted, and the others followed her lead. They stood in a clump with their initiates at the centre, and Dolores handed one of the guards a pouch of dried rice. “For the lot of us,” she said, her eyes cold and sharp.

He passed it to another guard, presumably their leader, who hummed as he weighed the pouch in his hand. Then he nodded. "Arms.”

"You heard the man." 

One by one they showed their weapons to the guard who then pointed off to the left where other vehicles had been parked. "Leave you bikes and weapons in Bundy. Then walk back." 

The women obeyed and parked their bikes at a rack beneath a torn poster of a bottle. This seemed to be the bike section as there were others already parked there. Most were cobbled together from corroded parts and grey tape. Theirs seemed almost ostentatious by comparison with their embroidered saddlebags and embossed leather upholstery.

Tilly's eyes narrowed as she slipped her strap from her shoulder. "How do we know they'll let us have them back?"

"We don't," said Shakti, her arms folded across her chest. 

"But they live off of running market here," Dolores explained. "If word gets out that they steal from their vendors..." She made a cutting motion across her throat. 

"No one will come to trade," K.T. finished. "And why bother when they can just charge an exorbitant entrance fee?" She locked a chain through the trigger well of her prized rifle, through the spokes of her bike’s wheel, and onto a fence post. "Doesn't mean I'm gonna be foolish about it though." She spun the key on her finger before slipping it into a pocket.

They claimed a stall along the outskirts because, according to K.T., they would have an easier time making a getaway if things got out of hand. Their stall was simple, a dirty, beige canvas tarp over a table of cracked wood. Dolores took a few small plants from her bag and arranged them so their green vines curled along the edges of the table and down the front of their awning. 

Then Shannian and Mags took the first shift at running their stall while Dolores and K.T. took Tilly and Furiosa to find the stalls of their favourite trading partners. Furiosa had never seen so many people all in one place. There were people and tribes of every type and appearance weaving among each other, speaking different languages. At every canvas or tarp-covered stall a different item was being hawked, foods, drinks, tools of every variety, objects she couldn't even begin to decipher. 

The first object to catch her eye was a little wind chime made from chards of iridescent metal. No, when she took it between her fingers she found that it was some sort of plastic, somehow not brittle from the sun. One side was painted with some kind of a picture; she held different pieces, fitting their edges together, but some were scratched beyond recognition. She finally found two pieces that fit well enough together for her to see the shape of a person stretched across an unrealistically fresh, paved road. 

“That’s a picture disk,” said K.T. over her shoulder. “If you put it in a picture machine, you can watch stories, well, you could have, when it was whole.”

"Hey," Dolores Stroke hissed as she waved K.T. and Furiosa over to join her and her Tilly at a stall. 

Furiosa let the picture shards drop from her fingers. They clanged together as they hit the limits of their cords.

“Oi, c’mon.” Delores motioned for them to huddle, and she then opened a can of brown powder. "Take a whiff, girls." One by one they sniffed, and Furiosa's nose filled with a deep and rich scent that floated into her mouth where it tasted bitter and down her throat where it made her cough. "Mm, fan-fuckin-tastic," Delores sighed. 

"What is it?" asked Tilly.

"Cocoa. The man says he'll bring the whole beans for us next time, now that he knows we're in the market." Dolores's excitement was palpable. The skin around her eyes crinkled like worn paper when she smiled. She shoved the can into her bag. 

“What does it do?” asked Furiosa, still trying to clear her throat from her overly enthusiastic sniff.

“You mix it with milk and heat it up; we’ll have some tonight,” said K.T. When she saw Furiosa’s wrinkled nose, she added with a chuckle, “The milk makes it less bitter.” 

So they moved on, venturing deeper into the market. They passed a small selling strange animals with big ears and round eyes, and Furiosa couldn’t tell if they were meant to be food or pets, but their cage was shaded even under the stall’s awning. One watched her from the shadows, chirping as she studied her reflection is its eyes. Her cheeks looked even plumper than usual.

Further down the aisle a man with a cone held to his face and shouted, "Git o'er here mates and see _The_ Fukushima Boy. He's the sole survivor. See how he glows in the dark." The man stood before a dark curtain, probably black once. His hair was long with bits of glass and metal braided into it. They knocked together like he wind chime when he shook his head as he spoke. "He's rad-ee-yo-active. See him before his half-life's done. Rub his head; get good luck." 

Furiosa let her fingers linger on the rough canvas curtain before slipping behind it while the man argued with a woman over the worth of a shiny stone. The inside was dark and cool with light shining through sloppily mended tent seams in defined beams. The famed Fukushima Boy watched her in silence as he crouched at the bottom of an otherwise empty cage. His round, pale eyes beaming from a wide, pale face in a way that reminded her of the small animal from before. He was naked, and about her age from is she had to make a guess, the hairs on his body still mostly a fine, white down. He didn't quite glow in the dark, not like the bioluminescent fungi she'd seen in her initiation cave. Instead he shone rather like the moon complete with a halo of clouds made from his woolly hair of lightest yellow. Suddenly the tent filed with light, and he dropped even lower and started tugging at his toes. Then the tent was dark again.

"Hey!" A hand grabbed her firmly by the wrist. "No fee, no lookies." She turned to see the man from outside smirk at her before he tugged her into a beam of light. "Unless of course you wanna stay?" 

Furiosa snarled as she bent her arm and used her elbow as leverage to withdraw her hand like the Mothers taught her. The bones in her forearm cut their path and she parted the man’s fingers easily. He paused, clicking his tongue before lunging again.

"Furiosa!" K.T. called from outside.

Furiosa drove her heal into the man’s foot and bolted when he yowled. She fumbled with the curtain, tripping over where 

"I told you to stay close," K.T. hissed.

"This yours? I caught it sneaking peaks," the man roared, stomping after her. "You owe me a debt... unless you wanna make a deal."

K.T. slid over to him, gliding and darting at once like a threatened snake, too far inside the man’s punching range for any strike he might decide to throw to be any good. She cut her elbow across the side of his waist and hissed as she struck his bottom ribs. “Not for sale!”

K.T. was easily a head shorter than him, even shorter than Furiosa who had only just started her adolescent growth spirt, but she cut a menacing figure even so. Her eyes cut into him with dark fire, and her hair, torn lose from the ride, loomed in a mad storm cloud. Her entire demeanour promised that given half a provocation she would destroy the man where he stood. She didn't have to. The man backed down, silent spare a few ragged, wincing breaths.

She tossed a handful of leaves at the man’s feet and then grabbed the hood of Furiosa’s jacket and dragged her away. Furiosa was still too shocked to protest. Her whole body shook as she panted, eyes wide and wet.

“What’s all this?” asked Dolores. “What did we miss?”

“Let’s go,” growled K.T. still fuming.

“But there was a boy there,” she burst out, regaining her faculties of speech all at once, “in a cage!”

K.T. loosened her grip so Furiosa could free herself. When Furiosa had spun around, she mutters, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Then she signed, softening now. “We can’t save everyone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this one needs a lot of notes. Please let me know if I miss anything:
> 
> Sarma are leaves, typically grape, stuffed with vinegar-soaked rice and sometimes nuts. I knew the dish as _dolmades_ , but apparently that refers to any kind of stuffed vegetable, and _same_ is the more specific term. These are a fairly common Mediterranean-style dish with lots of names. 
> 
> Hopefully you could figure out the Dolores Stroke is the Keeper of the Seeds but before she gets that title. Dolores Stroke refers to the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, who became wounded as punishment for a sin (usually implied to be sexual) and rules over a wasteland kingdom. The strike that caused his wound and the curse on the kingsom was given by the Spear of Longinus (also in legend used to stab Jesus while he was on the cross), and the strike itself is called the Dolores Stroke, which I just think is a great name for a Vuvalini punk band. In the legend, he also has in his possession the Holy Grail, and the only way to lift the curse is if someone asks the Healing Question, which is, "Whom does the grail serve?" 
> 
> The Clan name Drop Bear was suggested in a convertsation with Schwarmerei1 and awesomecake; it refers to a character in Australian advertising.
> 
> Tilly Devine was recommended by Ecouterbien; she was a famous member of an Australian girl gang.
> 
> The disk Furiosa is trying to piece together is the original Mad Max movie on Bluray, specifically from the European box set that came out when there were only three movies. I intend this to be more of an Easter Egg than any kind of significant worldbuilding, but I do like the idea that Miller's movies are self-fulling prophecies. 
> 
> The small animal is a Pygmy Possum. This one is domesticated, but it will still probably start screaming later.
> 
> "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," is a quote from _The Matrix_ , which took it from Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation._. I think K.T. knows it more from _The Matrix_ , but mostly she just likes the way it sounds.


	20. The 716th Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for suicide. As with all the dark subjects in this fic, I endeavor to treat this issue respectfully. Any feedback that might help me better achieve that end is always welcome. I've included a summary of the last (third) section of this chapter in the notes below.

_I sing of the young and fearful maiden,_  
_A child made old before her time_  
_By tasting death in bitter fruit._  
_How she folded her Mothers' sacred wisdoms,_  
_Into secret plots with hate-sharpened edges,_  
_And shut her eyes, her ears, her soul_  


### The 716th Day

Rani’s date loomed over the Vault like a storm cloud waiting to burst open. Miss Giddy had been gradually gathering up Rani’s garments for the ceremony, placing baubles and treasures in a place of honour as she found then. After the scraps from dinner had been sent away, Miss Giddy brought length of delicate, white fabric to the growing pile of fineries. Her hands shook as she clutched it. She raised it to her thin lips, spit, and then rubbed her thumbnail over a spot stained pink with old lip paint. Miss Giddy frowned then dropped the fabric, dejected. 

Then she disappeared into her room, probably to tinker with some experiment or to scan the airwaves with her radio. No one saw her again that night. Her absence was nothing unusual aside from lasting such a vast stretch of time.

Miss Giddy was late for lessons the next morning. She emerged with a crackle in her throat and red in her eyes. There was an anger in her voice that wasn't there before, or maybe Furiosa had just never noticed it. Now Giddy’s voice broke and her hands twitched as she led the lessons. 

She even took a break from The Lord of the Rings to tell the story of a baby found in a river. "S-L-A-V-E." Miss Giddy wrote in bold, violent letters. Then she took a long breath to collect herself before the room of blank faces. “Does anyone know what that means?” Her eyes lingered the longest on Corpus.  
June shook her head. Corpus shrugged. Furiosa stared, her face cold stone. “Yes,” she mouthed, her voice getting lost on its way out of her throat. 

“A slave is a person who belongs to someone else instead of to themselves. They have to do what they are told. They aren’t compensated for their work. They can’t leave when they want.” She narrowed her eyes bitterly. “Slaves are people denied their humanity and wrongly treated as property, as things.”

Snow swung her feet onto Promise's lap. "You mean like this?" 

Miss Giddy swatted Snow's shins away while she continued her lesson. “Durable, you said you knew what a slave was. How do you know?”

Furiosa chewed her lip in hesitation. “I saw a child in a cage at a market.” She shuddered as she spoke, remembering the precise way the child both noticed and ignored her at the same time.

“Oh…” said Promise, not quite from understanding or surprise. “Market flesh.” 

“I don't understand," protested Corpus. "Why would Pharaoh want to kill the Hebrew babies? That's a stupid waste. He could have sold them.”

Miss Giddy shook her head. “Absolute power does not readily lend itself to good decisions…” And then she told them how the secret slave baby was raised as a prince named Moses, how he came to know of his origins but continued to live as an Egyptian prince until the day he saw a slave driver beating a slave to death. She told them how he interceded, killing the slave driver, and then he fled into the desert. There he stayed until he had a vision: he saw a plant, burning with ardent flame but never consumed, which ordered him to return to _His_ people. Miss Giddy’s eyes burned like the proverbial bush, “And to lead them to a place of milk and honey, where they could be free, not just free from slavery, but free from want and care and...”

“How did he know he was a Hebrew?” Snow demanded.

“He had a Hebrew nurse, by some accounts, his mother,” Miss Giddy explained. Her shoulders caved momentarily. “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you that.”

“Then why did he live as an Egyptian prince?” Corpus pressed.

Miss Giddy’s eyes regain their fire. “Wouldn't you?”

Miss Giddy ended the lesson for the day there, and it would be thousands of days before Furiosa would learn how the story ended, thousands of days before she would hear of the plagues or the sign of blood, or the chase across the great salt. It would be thousands of days before she would know that Moses never reached the Promised Land; he died barely within view of it after a lifetime of wandering.

### 

That night was Snow's night, and it was as noisy as ever. Miss Giddy and the other wives huddled as usual in the bedrooms on the other side of the Vault in a vain effort to escape the sounds filling the night, sounds of what should have been pleasure. Snow’s voice rose along with Joe’s like it always did, and everyone else’s fell silent as they pretended that their efforts to block their ears had succeeded. By all counts, the night was ordinary.

Furiosa knew trying to sleep would be useless, and so she sat at the wall of the Dome and stared into the night as she planned her escape. If she could climb down at least a level and find her way back inside, she could follow the fabled escape route along the waste pipe; she just needed to know where to find it. She knew it had to be towards the center, near the main line because whoever set this place up originally wouldn't have wanted to do any extra digging. But even if that worked, then what? Just run blindly east? Could she steal a pedal bike? She shuddered at memories of her last failed attempt.

This spot had become hers by now. Where she used to stare out and think of home, now she thought of here. She watched. She listened. She noted the comings and goings of cargo, when the Boys amassed for training and missions, when the Wretched amassed for Waterings. And through her careful attention, she found which doors opened from the outside.

Furiosa stayed there kneeling in _her_ spot, staring out into the night, watching fog from her breath on the glass grow and recede and grow again. Her thoughts were still tumbling and jumbling together when the moaning from the bedroom finally stopped. Furiosa was hovering somewhere between thinking and dreaming, that fuzzy space where nothing is certain, when heavy footsteps jolted her to full awareness. 

She spun around without rising, her eyes narrowed, her toes flexed, and her fists clenched. She swallowed a feral hiss when she saw him, so very relaxed and smug, still flushed and sweating. Belly loose and hair mussed, Immortan Joe looked so clearly and undeniable human.

“Easy, Durable.” He cupped her face with his hand. “You should go to bed; you wouldn’t want to catch a chill.”

She said nothing. She simply nodded and waited for him to leave. She refused to demure and break her gaze first. It was a small rebellion, one he probably didn't even notice.

### 

Furiosa woke to the sound of breaking glass. Her eyes flew open, and she frantically ran her hands over the rippled but still intact glass of the window before her. She looked out into the still and clear night around the black and empty Vault. Then the sound came again, and she was ready; her head jerked to follow it, and she sprang into a crouch.

Snow stood bathed in moonlight, pale and brilliant with a metal folding chair raised above her head. Her lips were drawn back, her teeth bared in a raw and feral snarl. She huffed and then hurled the chair against the glass. It passed through this last time and then tumbled against the widened Citadel base before crashing to the ground below. Snow stood there for a moment, her eyes wild and wide.

He called her Snow for she was chilly and pale as the fabled white substance that coated mountains in storybooks. Rare, precious, magical, he had wanted her to be all those things, and maybe she was, in her way.

Then she crept towards the jagged hole she'd made in the glass and stepped up, scrunching herself to better fit. She hardly winced as it sliced open first one foot and then the other. Her blood flowed in black, glossy rivulets when she straightened herself to her full height, a pale wisp in the moonlight.

She steadied herself as she turned her head to look back at Furiosa from the outside. She held a single finger finger to her lips, and then she smiled behind the cracked and ancient glass as it glimmered.

Furiosa crouched in rapt silence, and in that moment, she felt not unlike the blood pooling on the ground. All this time, the glass of the Dome was just waiting to be broken. All this time, the outside air was just waiting to come in. And here it was - with any luck it would make her barren just as Joe feared.

Snow’s chest rose as she drew a long, deep breath of outside air. She withdrew her hand that had been delicately touching the side of the whole so that all of her was free, teetering on her feet as the glass cut them to ribbons. Then she jumped.

Snow let out a single chirp before she thudded against the Citadel side, not unlike a bird too soon out of the nest. Dead. Snow had to be be dead then. No one could possibly survive that fall, and if it weren't for the way her body tumbled the rest of the way after the first thud, Furiosa would have thought it likely painless and Snow likely brilliant.

Only then did Furiosa rise and run to the hole in the Dome. She peered outside. She couldn't see where Snow landed, but she knew the opening she had left would soon close behind her. Someone would find her. Someone had to have heard. And then he would be here to punish them for her loss and to ensure that no one followed her. Would he think someone had become jealous and pushed? She only knew that blame would fall on them, and that time, which had stretched to excruciating lengths for all her days here, was suddenly in short supply. She would not let the time pass and leave her behind.  
The night air called to Furiosa. She knelt and claimed for herself the longest, keenest shard of the ruin. She ran her fingers over the jagged, glass edges, their sharpness intoxicating, and she knew she was nowhere near as brave as Snow. But she could slip into the pool and drift away. If she didn't have people or a place somewhere far to the east… if she were a little more sorrowful instead of wrathful… if she hadn't made so many plans and promises.

She clutched the shard in her palm and then shifted her hand ever so slightly so the shard slid against her flesh. Her palm blossomed red and stung with piercing clarity. She breathed, riding the pain, letting the adrenaline cut through everything else until she knew – knew with absolute certainty what she needed to do.

The plan was set, and here, in her hand and right before, and and in a mess of blood and bone far below her, were the missing pieces. Never again would such an opportunity present itself. The plan would have to change to accommodate.

She ran her fingers of the glass shard with an overwhelming sense of reverence and gratitude. Then she tucked it away, carefully adjusting her chest wrappings so they cradled it beside her peach stone. She smiled, knowing it was destined for great things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary:  
> After Joe left for the evening, Furiosa fell asleep. She awoke to the sound of breaking glass and saw Snow jump to her death through a hole in the Dome. Furiosa kept a shard of broken glass for use in her escape attempt.
> 
> Notes:  
> A big thank you to [Squid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception) for beta-ing.
> 
> Miss Giddy is telling a version of the Exodus story while tailoring it for her audience, specifically Corpus.
> 
> The impact of Snow's death on the rest of the Vault inhabitants will feature heavily in future chapters. This chapter was hard for me to write, especially considering how Furiosa's struggles with empathy affect her POV as witness to Snow's suicide. I knew that one of the wives would die this was for a long time, but I did not know which one. I chose Snow because I wanted to show that all her nastiness towards other characters has always been her pain manifesting. Once I decided that, I gave her the habit of being the most vocal during sex with Joe. She orgasmed and hated herself for it. Make no mistake, she was still being raped.


	21. The 716th Day Continued and a Memory from 900 Days Before

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated. I’m still here! 
> 
> TW in this one for heavily implied cannibalism and some violence.

### The 716th Day

Jennifer Gideon awoke to a figure barging into her room. She clutched at her blankets, her eyes widened, and she tried to carefully meter her breaths. At least they felt like she was carefully metering them -her head spun beneath her adrenaline veneer. Her panic faded slightly when she recognised the distinctive femininity of the shape before her. She fumbled for her oil lamp.

"Durable," Jennifer said.

The girl's mouth moved, but no words came out.

"What is it?"

"Miss Giddy, Snow..." now her lips hardly parted as she spoke. "She jumped." The words fell, sinking like stones. 

"You mean?" Jennifer didn’t need to wait for an answer. She knew. She’d seen the desperation in Snow’s eyes.

"She broke the glass,” Durable whispered. “Now she's gone."

"Are you sure she..."

Snow could have slipped out, found a way to climb down, or simply landed too early, maybe broken a bone or two...

"I heard her hit, twice,” Durable stated, “the wall and then the ground."

Miss Giddy covered her mouth in horror. She knew what it was to want to die, but something had always stopped her, fear of pain, fear of failure… she could never be sure. Whatever it was, the thought of the girl’s body breaking against the stone of the Citadel stirred it in her belly. She gagged down bile rising in her throat.

"He'll punish us, won't he." Durable’s voice was soft but steady and certain."

"Oh, Durable. It wasn't your fault, and he doesn't have to know that you saw it."

"Wouldn't he punish all of us then?” There was a chill in Durable’s eyes and steel in her voice. “Wouldn’t he just assume she was pushed? What if she was pregnant? What if we were jealous?"

Giddy lowered her eyes. There was no point in lying. "He might." She turned away and started gathering the stray books from the floor; she needed to hide the most subversives one, not to mention the still and..." Her mind was a muzzy jumble, her tongue thick and heavy when she said. "If it's anyone's fault, it's mine." Her eyes wandered to the spot where Snow had just been leaning against one of her bookshelves a few short hours before. Other nights Snow had sat on Giddy’s bed beside her, drinking the medicine, and then before that... every time she would take her shots and her soup until she teetered on the edge of oblivion. The she would smile as her eyes glazed over. That oblivion was obviously what she wanted, and who could blame her? 

Giddy should have known, should have seen, but she was too busy chasing her own parallel suspension. It was an agreeable arrangement: the two women, one older and one younger, one tired in her bones and both tired in their souls, putting a warm haze between themselves and the world.

Durable’s eyes narrowed. "He probably will - he'll think she was pushed, and that we were jealous, but it's his fault, no one else's." 

Durable was right, and that truth was as inescapable as the mess of books and old world trinkets cluttering Giddy’s room. "Help me hide our valuables," she said, forcing her voice to steadiness. They just needed to concentrate the mess in front of everything she didn't want him to see, hide the still with the radio in the wall compartment and block off access and attention with tattered books and whatever else they could find. 

"Let me take the blame." Durable pleaded with confident, purposeful desperation. "I could have stopped her. I didn't."

Giddy hugged an armload of books to her chest. "Even if you do this for us, there is no guarantee he will stop after you."

"He will,” Durable insisted. 

"Whatever you are planning, don't tell me anything." The fact that Durable had told her anything at all was miraculous enough. Jennifer studied the girl with steel in her eyes and a determined set to her jaw. There had been plans before; at one time Miss Giddy even had plans of her own. She couldn’t blame the girl for trying, even if every plan before had found a different way to fail.

### 

June was lying awake when Furiosa crept into their bedroom. For Furiosa to fall asleep at the Dome and then come to bed when she woke in the middle of the night was ordinary. She always tried to be quiet, but June was a light sleeper. Ordinarily, Furiosa would almost hold her breath, letting out only the slightest stream of air through her pursed lips as she snuck into her own bed. Tonight Furiosa’s breath was ragged, her eyes wild, her hands shaking as she stepped into June’s view. Their eyes met.

He named her June for a season that didn't happen anymore, for gentle sun with cool breezes, for rich harvests of fat squashes. Miss Giddy gave her a book, a forbidden book about another girl named June. She read it alone for it was to horrid for the others. That June wore red; this June wore white. 

Furiosa hissed as she leaned over the bed, “Give me your hand.” She hunched her shoulders over June to cover their exchange even in the darkness. June's hand with it’s smooth skin and delicate bones found hers, and Furiosa pressed the flat edge of the precious shard of glass into her palm. “Be careful with this.” She took a long breath to steady herself. “Its sharp.”

“What's going on?” June mumbled.

“We don’t have much time. Take it." Furiosa closed June's hand. "Mind the edges." Her voice quivered at first, but then she found its steel as she hovered her mouth over June’s ear. "Cut the sheets into strips and tie them together like in the book. Make them thick, reinforced if you can. Then give the glass to Rani."

"What's happening?” June was still groggy but her voice more insistent.

"The plan is changing,” Furiosa hissed. “Even if you don't finish with the sheet, you have to get this to Rani."

June sat up, her eyes now bright with adrenaline. “Durable, tell me what’s happening?”

Furiosa paused, all the steel leaving her spine and her knees. She sunk into the bed as she released an only half conjured sob. “I…uh…” Where to begin? “He’s going to punish me...”

“Oh, Duri, what did you do?” June’s voice was full of pity and concern like for a child or a pet that had gotten itself into a scrape.

“Nothing. That’s the problem. You’ll know soon enough, but...” Furiosa lifted her gaze straight into June's eyes and found her steadiness. “But this is our chance.” She touched the back of June's hand that held the glass shard. “Make sure Rani gets this. She and I will take care of him. Then we’re leaving and never coming back.”

June’s coal-black eyes were wide, her voice small and shaking as she wrapped her arms around Furiosa. “Aren’t you afraid?” 

Furiosa said nothing. She didn’t even nod in the cover of darkness. Of course she was afraid; she would be stupid not to be. She held the image of the shattered window in her mind and clutched it like a lifeline. June tightened their embrace and stroked Furiosa's curls. Furiosa shuddered; she wasn’t not sure if it was because June’s touch or because of its futility.

“We get out tomorrow or never,” Furiosa finally said as she shrugged June’s arms away.

They set to work. The bedroom Furiosa shared with Promise and June fell silent again except for the soft sound of June tearing sheets. Furiosa ran her thumbnail through the grooves on her peach stone and counted her days. She had been gone well over 700 by now. Could she even still call herself a Vuvalini? She tried to imagine K.T. or her birth mother or even Valkyrie trapped here, but she shook her head. In here, in this place, such questions didn’t matter. 

June passed Furiosa the finished strips in the dark, and Furiosa tied them together by feel like they had seen in the book. Then Furiosa laid out the strips in parallel so their knots all fell at the head of the bed. She positioned her blanket at the ready so she could turn it over the sheet strips at a moment's notice. All the while Promise slept, perfectly ignorant and innocent of how the world was already changing around her. 

June was the first to speak, "Should I tell Rani?"

"Finish this first. I'll go to her if there's time. Then you go. Get her the glass no matter what.”

"And Promise?" June turned to where she was sleeping. 

Furiosa stayed focused on her work. “She'll know soon enough."

"Can she come with us?" 

Promise was the closest to happy there of any of them, at least she appeared so. But would that change when her sisters were gone, when she had no more June to hold her and stroke her hair? She would be alone with Miss Giddy, facing either punishment or wealth and luxury beyond any of their imaginings, probably both.

Furiosa shrugged in the darkness. "All we are doing is opening a door. Going through is up to h-" 

Furiosa cut her whisper short at what she thought was the sound of boots in the hallway. She threw her blanket over their progress on the sheet harness. Then she held a finger to her lips as she crept to the corner of the room closest to the outside wall. They were bootsteps to be sure; she held her breath as she waited for them to pass. They didn't; they stopped outside the door.

### Two and a Half Years Earlier

One especially hard summer, when the clans were dangerously close to eating through their emergency stores, the Grandmothers sent the Messengers to find the men's tribe. The plan was for the men to open the closest of the emergency vaults where the Vuvalini and their allies had hidden food and water rations in scattered caches. It would be many days before anyone knew if the Messengers had successfully reached the men and after that many more days before the men could bring them bags of dried grains from the food vaults, thirty days at minimum before food if food was found at all. The catches could have been raided, the food stolen or spoiled, or the men might have been nowhere near a cache or even massacred on their travels. So the women were left to wait, to scrap together meagre rations from their dwindling foodstores. Groups of women left the Green Place, some to trade with trusted tribes and others to fish among strangers and enemies, always with at least hopes to return with enough supplies to sustain the Vuvalini for at least another few days until the next group and the next mission.

K.T. fetched Furiosa at first light, and pulled her onto the back seat of the strongest of the Vuvalini bikes without a word. They road off with just the roaring engine filling the silence of the desert morning. Valkyrie and her initiate mother Shannian joined them a few clicks down the road as did another pair of full Vuvalini Furiosa did not know as well. The women exchanged only the briefest of greetings from atop their bikes and road on, kicking up clouds of dust behind them as they fanged for the sun.

They road until the sun was above them, and then they stopped to nap under their sun shades. Only then did Furiosa notice how Shannian wore none of her Vuvalini accoutrements, no beads or feathers, no fine embroidery or brocade on her riding trousers and simple jacket. On other trips, these siestas were jovial, women swapping stories as they sipped water and nibbled at grapes and seed crackers in the shade until the sun moved into the west. Today their rest time was just as quiet as their ride and their rations carefully measured. There was hardly enough to go around, but Shannian waved her food away so the others could have more.

“Where are we going?” Valkyrie finally asked Shannian.

“Fishing,” K.T. answered for her. “We shall be fishers of men.”

Furiosa had almost guessed as much. The clans were desperate enough. “How will it go?”

K.T. counted her ammunition as she spoke. “There is a fishing post another half day east. We should reach it by nightfall then make camp in the dark, no fires, no headlights. Shannian will climb for us in the morning will we wait for her signal in the shadows.”

Furiosa nodded in solemn understanding. K.T. had told her of the fishing trips before, of their risks and rewards, but Furiosa had never before come along. The Vuvalini hadn’t needed to fish for someone time, not since the early days when they were still learning the ways and whims of their land. Now they were hungry and desperate.

“Mothers be with us,” Furiosa whispered as she pulled her hand to her chest. 

K.T. echoed her gesture. “They always are, whether we would have them or not.”

Valkyrie nodded in agreement, but her eyes wandered to her Initiate Mother, her own face bunching with the worry the showed obviously in Shannian’s posture. “Is my mother alright?”

K.T. shook her head, “Alright is a bit beyond us all right now, but she has done this before, and she will survive it again. She has a gift for it, a….” K.T. let her voice drift of as she embraced Valkyrie. “It’s a hard thing she does, but she does it by choice for all of us, and we will see her through it.”

The rest of the day past as K.T. had said. They came to an old radio tower in a dune field between two mountain ridges. They cut their engines and hid their bikes in the sand. Then their tried to sleep curled around each other and their engines for warmth. No on really slept much that night or ate the next morning. 

Shannian was even more withdrawn that morning. Furiosa thought she heard her wrenching when she snuck off to relieve herself, but the sounds were muffled, and no one else batted and eye. Then Shannian returned, having traded her riding gear for a gauzy robe. She was about K.T.’s age, not quite forty summers, and just as short. The thin fabric of her robe clung to her slight frame, showing every goosebump when she shivered. 

K.T. showed Valkyrie and Furiosa where to hide, and she and the other Vuvalini positioned themselves in similarly sheltered spots around the fishing pole. They watched as Shannian hid her robes and then shimmied her naked body up to the fishing perch. She carefully studied the possible routes up and down and then tied a small knife in its sheath to the platform scaffolding. 

Then Shannian screamed. She wailed and cried in primal terror as women had since the days of the Nemean Lion. She twisted her body, lettin her pale skin fold onto herself when she exhaled and lifting and flaring her rib cage to give an extra ache to every sound. Around her, a breeze shook the wind chimes of bits of mirrors, adding to the spectacle.

Furiosa squirmed at Shannian’s every cry of shrill desperation. Every one of the Vuvalini was watching; they could all see that she was in no immediate danger, but her every sound and movement radiated terror. Even when she had to stop to catch her breath, she shook with panic. She rattled the radio tower with the force of her trembling hands.

“She’s just acting, right?” Furiosa whispered to Valkyrie who nodded so her dark hair fell over her eyes.

"Half," Valkyrie whispered back solemnly.

K.T. nodded as well. "She's really that hungry, that vulnerable, that desperate. She wouldn't make good bait otherwise."

Furiosa looked around to the faces of the other women and saw that they all looked just as uncomfortable as she felt. Shannian’s screams seemed to surround them as they echoed off the dunes. At the base of every cry was a moan, an ache so deep it cut beneath the shrill screams. And in between was breathy desperation. 

"How does she know what sounds to make?" Furiosa asked, but she could already feel the answer as a lump in the pit of her belly.

"She's not acting; she's remembering,” explained one of the Vuvalini Furiosa did not know.

“Everything you’ve ever felt, every ounce of fear, anger, joy, loss…”. K.T. met Furiosa’s eyes with a ferocious intensity as she closed a gloved hand over her chest. “It’s still in you. They are yours; you’ve earned them. You can hide them and build up walls around them to keep you safe, you can let them run wild, or you can claim them, master them, and use them.”

"Will we climb the fishing tower?" asked Valkyrie. "Is that part of our training?"

“No.” K.T.’s answer was sharp, “Not if you're lucky."

No one passed by the tower that morning. Just before high noon, Shannian slunk down to the dunes to hide from the sun and pour water down her dry throat one too small sip at a time. The other women gave her space and words of encouragement that some hapless strangers would come by once the heat of the day was over. She nodded, choking down another mouthful. Then she nibbled at some crackers in silence.

”If you need relief, just say the word,” K.T. assured Shannian as she sternly watched her eat. “We don’t need you passing out up there.”

”Don’t worry.” Shannian almost smiled. “I’ll catch us a nice, fat one.”

No sooner had the words left her mouth than did a distant rumble send her scurrying back up the tower. The other Vuvalini took the positions, rifles trained on the base of the tower. They waited while Shannian built up her cries to their full intensity. They shifted from shrill shriek to the low, primal tones of deepest desperation and back again as she shook her hair and her breasts. Furiosa considered K.T.’s words as she watched, and she wondered if she too held such savagery inside her. 

The vehicle that appeared was a small ute modified with an oversized engine for its body. There was a driver and a passage, both men and neither especially well fed. They were better than nothing, and the Vuvalini were in no position to throw small fish back to the wastes.

Shannian’s panic turned to joy. “Oh, oh, help me, help me!” she panted as she practically threw herself off the tower.

”What might be your problem, little lady?” one of the men called through his opened door.

”I’m trapped. Can you help me down?”

The first man to speak stood with his hand shielding his eyes. He closed the door behind him and the put his other hand at a pistol at his hip. He looked to his companion, the slightly larger and darker of the two for agreement before slowing stepping towards the tower.”

”For a price,” the larger man called as he stepped out of his side of the vehicle. “What do you offer? Someone put you up there, someone who won’t be too happy to see you back on the ground.”

“I have nothing,” Shannian pleaded. “They left me behind as punishment, execution by crows.” By now tears were running down her face, and she swayed on her feet, looking every bit the part of the damsel she played.

”We’ll try,” said the shorter man. “Just you stay put.” 

He approaches slowly, hand on his pistol until he reached the base of the tower. Then he started to climb while his companion waited on the ground, his own weapon aimed at Shannian as she gripped the tower to keep herself from falling off. Furiosa couldn’t be sure if she was acting or if she really was about to pass out from the stress and the heat. Shannian positioned herself just above the man as she reached for him and begged him to hurry. He did hurry, so much that he almost fell as he scrambled to the top. Shannian caught him though with a swift and sure motion, and between their four hands they managed to hoist him onto the platform with her. He stood there beside her, ensnared by Shannian’s body so unabashedly naked before him.

K.T. whispered to Furiosa in a gleeful lilt, “The history if the world my love...” 

Then Shannian ululated, and K.T. squeezed her trigger, sending a bullet straight into the back of the larger man’s skull. The man on the platform barely had time to register what was happening, before Shannian slipped a blade into his side first and then across his throat. She hissed at him as he fell, blood gurgling from his body and dripping down onto the sand.

K.T. smiled as she continued her little song, “Is those down below serving those up above.”

The women ululated with joy as they sprung from their hiding places to inspect their kills and to help Shannian down from the tower. No sooner were her feet on the ground then was she doubled over and vomiting into the sand. When her belly was empty she looked up to see K.T. holding out the robe she had dropped in her rush for the ground. 

”Thank you,” Shannian muttered as the wiped her mouth and then let K.T. guide her into the robe with little regard for how the blood on her shoulders and chest might stain it.

”No,” said K.T. slipping her arm about Shannian’s back, “thank you.” 

”Two for the price of one,” Shannian said with a weak smile as the two walked together to the safety of the shade. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may pry my musical theatre-loving K.T. Concannon from my cold, dead jaws. Here she’s quoting _Sweeney Todd_.
> 
> There’s also a Bible reference, and a mention of the Nemean Lion, which was one of the labours of Hercules from Greek Mythology. The lion used women as bate to lure men, its true prey. Wikipedia claims that some version have the bate woman actually turning into the lion, but I could not find a proper source. If you aren’t current on your Hercules stories, you may want to read up; you will find them, erm, familiar. The Vuvalini tell them often, Hercules being one of the few male heroes of their mish-mash mythology. They find his man-pain especially fitting to a wasteland setting, and they have even incorporated him into their own origin story.
> 
> Oh, and if you are wondering about Shannian’s knife, she tied the sheath with the knife in it to one of beams on the platform floor when she first climbed up the tower.


	22. The 717th Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tigger Warning! Trigger Warning! Heavy, violent abuse in this one -there will be a summary at the end.

### The 717th Day

_I sing of the plans the mad child wove,_  
_Like spider threads sticky and strong._  
_That something so small might weave_  
_A trap so intricate, so cunning, so delicate,_  
_And I sing of how they tore, fibers shredded_  
_Down to wisps, back to shadows whence they came._

There was a staircase in the Vault, carved from the stone of the wall. At the top was a door that was always locked. No one ever went up or came down. It sat there in stillness and silence, all but forgotten. It seemed to simply disappeared into the wall except when Furiosa would climb to the top step and sit, watching the Vault with the locked door to her back, the door that led to nowhere. The girls would sometimes whisper stories like the one about the girl who fought back, the girl whose teeth Joe took. Those were the kind of things that happened behind the Nowhere Door. Nothing good ever came of its opening.

The Nowhere Door loomed just at the edge of Furiosa’s vision. She could almost feel it watching her as it waited to open for her. And what would she lose to that room? She would do alright - maybe fingernails or something similarly replaceable; she hadn’t fought back, not yet anyway. If she failed at this her punishment would be far worse. She pushed the thought from her mind. 

Miss Giddy and the wives stood solemnly in a semi-circle with War Boy guards behind them. The Immortan Joe was in the centre, mere centimetres between his boots and the edge of the pool. The women waited to be berated, and they would be soon enough, but for now they watched the Immortan mourn. He’d ordered Snow’s body brought back into the Citadel and examined. She had been pregnant, or at least the Organic Mechanic declared her so, and Joe believed him.

Joe swayed and hummed as he stare with vacant eyes over the shallow pool. There would be a funeral, at least for the baby even though it couldn’t have been larger than a peach stone. Snow’s belly hadn’t even been swollen. Everyone else was silent as the rumble of Joe’s humming echoed, growing everytime it bounced off stone until it filled the room.

“Why did no one tell me?” Joe asked, his voice rising from him like the first steam from boiling water as he finally broke his trance and turned towards the women.

“We were asleep,” Miss Giddy pleaded on all of their behalf. “We didn’t know.”

“I mean the baby.” His voice was cold and quiet, like he wanted to savour the ebb and flow of her terror as he waiting for just the right moment to bring it to its height.

“She never said anything about that,” Giddy insisted. “She bled not five days ago. I saw the rags.” She straightened her spine and met his gaze as she spoke. She was no short woman but he still towered over her. His decorated armour and thick hair only enhanced his already intimidating build, but Miss Giddy swelled with rage, and that rage became foolish courage. “Perhaps some concern for the loss of your wife might be-”

His hand met Giddy’s mouth before she could finish. She staggered back. The fire in her eyes flickered but stayed strong. She reclaimed her ground, even gained a centimetre or two. Her bare toes gripped the floor before his black boots.

“How dare you insinuate…” He never finished his sentence. 

Instead he growled and tore into the furniture. A folding chair rose and sunk, clattering against the stone floor. It landed half a metre in front of Promise who jumped back, startled out of its way.

“Do not think for one instant that I want anything less than the best for all of you.” The Immortan seemed to crush the words from his mouth as if forming them from soft aluminium.

He sent another chair hurling into the chalkboard where the ghosts of the letters S-L-A-V-E had been left behind. The chair fell just a little short and hit the chalkboard’s leg. By some stroke of luck the wheels at least on that side had been left unlocked. Instead of falling over, the chalkboard spun out to reveal its rear side of cracked cork. All the while his pair of War Boy guards watched in stillness and silence.

“Ungrateful, spoiled, wretches! This is the highlife. I give you the best of everything. You are safe, secure…” Joe’s rant grew in volume and shrunk in coherency. 

Joe’s anger grew as he roared, as if his voice and movements were feeding off of each other like a car racing down a hill full throttle. Some people are born without brakes; they must go and go until they have either burned off all their fuel or crashed into something large enough to stop them. None of the women were willing to be that thing for him. So they waited, shifting their positions to avoid the brunt of his onslaught until he burned himself out.

Kicking one more chair away, The Immortan approached Giddy and huffed, “Now, tell me what happened.”

“We were asleep, all of us. We didn’t know she’d done it until you told us.” Giddy’s voice was clear and steady. Her posture showed a calculated submissiveness with her eyes sharp for all the slumping of her shoulders. 

He took her chin between his thumb and fingers. “I should have you replaced and executed.” He paused, drew a distinctive sniff, and then threw her against the floor. “After everything I’ve done…” Then he was ranting again, overthrowing chairs and filling the Vault with his booming voice. 

Beneath the cover of the commotion, Furiosa looked to Rani whose dark eyes darted with a knowing fire. Rani’s mouth twitched, and her hands twisted the fabric of her clothing as Furiosa looked her over in search for the glass shard. There was no sign of it, but June ample opportunity to pass it beneath the cover of chaos. Even if Rani didn’t have the shard yet, she had to have figured out the new plan by now. Everything about Rani’s tense demeanour radiated not fear but excitement, like the currents beneath her skin were ready to launch her into explosive action. 

So Furiosa forced herself to feel the same energy. Though her guts twisted, and everything shook from her scalp to her toes. Furiosa stepped forward. The flames of her namesake burning in her blood, she dragged her panicked eyes to meet his and from ragged breath formed the three little words that would change everything: "I saw it."

The Immortan stopped and turned to her, his bulk looming over her. "What was that?"

"I saw it," Furiosa repeated and then, "I was there. I saw her jump. I was too far away… didn't have time to stop it..."

"And you told no one?" Joe’s hands twitched as he spoke, hands close enough to touch, to stoke, to maim.

"I was afraid." The words caught in her throat. Furiosa was still afraid, afraid for all of them, afraid for the words that came next.

"Did you push..."

Furiosa cut him off, her indignation getting the better of her fear, "I would never." 

He stepped closer with every word. "And did you know she was..."

"No," Furiosa's voice rose defiantly at the idea that this man thought his favour so desirable. "But I said I would never."

"You could have saved him if you had only..." Joe’s hands twitched with rage.

Something inside her went calm and quiet as though she were existing in the space between heartbeats. The world seemed to even stop spinning as it waited for her to speak. " _She_ didn't want to be saved."

Furiosa ducked, deftly avoiding his hand. She was pleasantly surprised at reflexes. They were not as sharp as they had been, not after being hidden beneath years’ worth of dust and softened skin. She rose as if filled with smoke to her full height. He still towered over her, but she'd found a fire in her belly, and she felt herself swell with it. She waited for him to swing at her again.

Instead he said, "Thank you for your honesty, Durable. It will serve you well.” He touched her cheek with his thumb in that way he always did, cupping her chin in his palm while his fingers extended along the underside of her jaw. “You must still be punished of course, but I know you can take it.” He gave her a look that said he meant it as a complement, and then he let her go as his face fell dark as he turned to Miss Giddy. “You are not the only one who sinned against me. Someone gave her the idea.” He didn’t reach for Miss Giddy though, instead he turned his storm towards her room. 

The War Boy guards seized Furiosa by the arms and held her while the Immortan tore through Miss Giddy’s room. It echoed with crashing sounds as it vomited books. They landed in jumbles, their covers falling open, their spines bending and their pages crumpling. Bottles of clear liquid followed, some breaking on the stone. Then the copper tubes of the still came. One last roar shocked the room, and then it ejected the talking box.

“Take her up,” Immortan ordered the Boys before crushing the talking box between his boot and the stone floor. “I’ll be there shortly.” 

The pair of War Boy guards dragged Furiosa towards the stairs to the Nowhere Door. At first she went willingly, knowing she was too valuable to really be vulnerable, but then her fear set in, and she struggled. She stomped on their feet, opened her hands, and twisted her wrists so her bones cut against the fingers struggling to maintain their grips. 

No sooner had she wrenched a hand free -- Thwack! A hand, Joe’s hit her jaw so hard she tasted blood. It pulsed through her split lip hot and savage with hatred. Her throbbing jaw felt good in a way; Joe had hurt her in so many ways over the hundreds of days he had kept her, every way but this. At least this kinda of hurt was honest, its savage brutality making no effort to conceal itself.

She complied with the guards long enough for them to take her up the stairs. She spat at Joe from the top even though by now he was far out of range. She held him in her sight lines as she torqued her hips and drove her heel on her free side into the knee of one of her captors. She didn’t care that they were just doing their jobs; she just needed to let off some steam before she had to save herself for _him_.

The War Boy she’d kicked yelped as he stumbled back. He tried unsuccessfully to catch himself, but he ended up stumbling down the stone stairs. Furiosa gave a single, self-satisfied huff. Then the Boy still holding her grabbed a clump of her hair with his dress hand. He jerked her head back as he twisted her arm behind her back. 

Furiosa heard one cry of pain from Miss Giddy and a gasp from the other girls as the Boy shoved her into the room at the top of the stairs. He threw her onto a rickety, metal bed and then shut the heavy door, blocking out the entire rest of the world. 

Furiosa pulled herself into a crouch on the lumpy mattress. Her eyes darted about the room, lit only by a single, dim oil lamp. Her guard’s white chest practically glowed. He was panting, sweating enough that the paint on his face had smeared, the black and white blending into a sickly grey. He was probably cursing himself for letting a mere slip of a girl put up such a struggle… or maybe not. His eyes were on her as he leaned panting against a wall, his expression hard to read in the low light but clearly not one of anger. 

Furiosa sniffled, her nose still running from the blow she had taken. “Will he be long?” she finally asked when the silence became overwhelming. The Boy said nothing, just kept staring at her. He was a new Boy, not one of those the Immortan usually brought to the Vault as his personal guards. 

“Was real chrome,” he whispered, “how you kicked Otto down the stairs.”

She said nothing. What was she supposed to say? To graciously accept the complement from the man whose job it would be to hold her still while she was beaten? What was his approval supposed to mean to her? Then something in eyes caught her notice, something familiar from hundreds of days in the past: Reaper. 

She looked up slowly, willing his eyes to meet hers. “Do you remember me?” He gave no sign of recognition. “You witnessed my mother, sent her to Valhalla,” Furiosa offered, using the words she’d heard the Boys shout during their drills in the yard beneath the Dome. He knew, his dark eyes glimmered with recognition. “What’s your name?” 

He blinked like the thought had never occurred to him that a wife of the Immortan might speak to him, even one in so desperate a position. He’d talked so much before, been so incongruously kind. She’d even thought to find him the one time she managed to escape to the hallway. She’d been stupid to think she could pick his face out of the crowd of so many painted similarly, and she was still stupid to think she could know him now or that knowing him would be of any use... but here he was. 

“Desmo.” The answer came as barely a whisper.

“Desmo,” she echoed.

She had no reason to trust him, no reason to believe he was anything other than hopelessly brainwashed, but he had been kind once. He had been gentle. She was spinning her wheels, desperate for traction. The plan hadn’t started as rushed, but in Furiosa’s haste to adapt it she had neglected to factor in the guards. She’d assumed they would wait outside the Vault as always when Joe seized his privileges, but now she doubted. What if Desmo stayed with his master? What if she and Rani had to kill him as well? She knew she would if she must, that kind and gentle or not, she would not let him stand between her and her freedom, but what if fighting two soldiers was more than they could manage? 

“This is what happens to the girls you give to the Immortan,” she said as she wiped her nose for good measure. “He feeds us and shelters us, yes, but he beats us and rapes us; he locks us here and calls us his. He steals our names. He calls me Durable, but I was never his to name. I am one of the Vuvalini, of the Many Mothers. I am the daughter of Mary Jabassa, and the name she gave is Furiosa.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Immortan Joe punishes his wives and Miss Giddy for Snow’s death. Furiosa tells him that she saw Snow jump so he will punish her and rape her, thereby making himself vulnerable to an attack by Rani with the glass shard from the break in the Dome. During Joe’s ragings, he tears through Miss Giddy’s room and finds both the still and the radio. He beats Miss Gidddy for planting seeds of rebellion in Snow. He does this in full view of the wives, except for Furiosa, whom he sends to the room at the top of the stairs under the control of two War Boy guards. Furiosa fights back instinctively even though she meant to go willingly and ends up kicking one of the guards down the stairs. The other locks her in the upstairs room, and now that they are alone, they recognise each other. He is the War Boy who killed her mother and brought her to the Citadel. Furiosa remembers that he was kind to her before, and in her desperation, she tries to win his sympathy and help.


	23. The 717th Day Continued

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major trigger warning for physical assault/abuse as well as non-graphic rape in line with previous chapters. Chapter summary posted in End Notes. I will be posting this chapter and the next in short sequence.

Fear burned in Furiosa’s chest and soured her mouth. Joe strolled into the room and regarded her with something akin to disappointment as she drew long, deliberate breathes. His War Boy guards didn’t need to pin her against the bed; she sat there on that lumpy, rancid mattress locked inside herself until Joe reached for her. Then she jerked herself back like a twitchy rodent in a trap.

“Not so feisty now, I see.” Joe shook his head. Then to the guards he said, “Get her on her feet,” as if hitting a woman on a bed were suddenly beneath him.

They obeyed wordlessly. They dragged Furiosa from the bed to stand before him. She complied, forcing her legs to move and her guts to be still. She’d known this moment was coming; she’d chosen it as the least undesirable of many undesirable outcomes, but that didn’t make it any easier to face. If she fought, she would make everything worse for herself, but she started to suspect that after seeing her launch one of his guards down the stairs, Joe would goad her until she did. Perhaps he was tiring of women who cowered. So many times she’d fantasized about crushing Joe’s tender bits between her fingers. Even now she could hear K.T. leading the children of the Vuvalini through a chant of, _temple, philtrum, jugular, caratoid, larynx, medulla..._ , and her eyes moved over Joe’s skull like K.T.’s cleaning had moved her visual aid. She pretended she could see through his skin.

Of course, none of that would be terribly useful now. Furiosa‘s aim needed to be satisfying Joe enough that he would send his guards away, at least Otto. Reaper-Desmo was still a mystery. She had told him nothing other than her own name and the name of a people he had probably never heard of. No, she had told him she was unhappy here; she had told him everything. Regardless, he was an enemy until proven otherwise.

Joe’s first hit to her was a punch to the arm, not unlike her mothers used to do to each other when they were feeling randy. She wondered if that’s what he wanted from her: desire. She had none to give. She closed her eyes and counted to herself the lengths of sheet rope to the next level down. 

Joe’s second hit was a knee to Furiosa’s solar plexus that left her gasping and would have emptied her stomach is she’d managed any breakfast. Instead as she caved and drooped between the Boys on each arm, heaving and straining for breath, her stomach emptied itself of fear. She’d been terrified of the pain Joe might inflect on her body, and here it was. She’d thought she would last more than two hits. 

She jerked herself reflexively out of the path of his next strike, which glanced off her cheek. She pressed her feet into the floor and jumped, swinging her shin at his thigh. Her leg passed his by as the Boys pulled her back. She huffed and snarled as she tugged against them; her mothers always told her that her voice was a weapon, that even if she couldn’t be fearless she could at least sound it.

The Boys only held her more tightly. Joe took her chin in his hand and lifted her face to look into his, and Furiosa dared him with her eyes to strike her stomach again so she might find some half-digested morsel to spit on him. Instead his boot collided with her ribs, sending a crack and a howl echoing off the walls. 

She hurt. Her lungs had to fight for every breath. She wanted nothing more than to wrap herself around her aching middle and vomit shamelessly. If there had been dark and quiet and solitude, that’s what she would have done. And she would have wept. She would have let herself crumple. Her legs were already buckling, her vision blurring as she dangled from her captors’ hands. 

She let out a single sob which hurt more than anything yet, hot and sharp and frightening. Then her fear returned, no, a different fear, not of what he might do to her but of what it might mean. She saw herself crippled, broken, trapped. She saw the flame of her rage smothered.

“Please,” she whispered between gritted teeth, “stop.”

Joe said nothing. He simply nodded to the Boys who dragged her towards the bed. The one called Otto beamed as he jerked her by the arm as hard as he could. _Wham!_ Her left shoulder hit the bed post at just the right angle to knock her arm from its socket. Furiosa shrieked as an explosion of white, blinding pain swallowed her.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t think. She could only squeeze her eyes shut as she panted, and she counted. _One. Two. Three_. And she waited, not for time to pass, for Rani to come, for her mind to go blank and dark, for the Reaping Mother to take her… _Four. Five._. Her eyes opened. _Dead girls don’t get home._

She looked first to Joe, to his wild eyes of chilly blue, and then to Desmo on her right, and the she looked down in silent submission. Joe swung his hand, but not at her. Otto yelped, his hands flying to cover his bleeding nose. 

“Enough!” Joe roared. Another savage swing sent Otto sprawling in the floor. He started to rise, but Joe’s boot on his hand stopped fixed him to the stone. “You had better not have damaged her.”

Desmo stood in silence, his fingers on his belt, on what must be a tool or a weapon. “Please,” Furiosa mouthed, but he didn’t seem to notice. His dark eyes were warm and filled with adoration as he awaited his orders.

“Go fetched the Mechanic,” Joe barked to Otto, and the to Desmo he said, “No, you wait outside as usual.”

They obeyed, and Furiosa was alone with Joe. He made cooing noises as he stroked her cheeks as if she were a frightened animal. “I’m sorry that beast hurt you, my Durable. We’ll have you fixed up good as new.”

Furiosa shifted, testing first her hand and then her arm. Every little movement sent fire spreading through her cramping muscles atop the already steady throbbing. Even so, Joe’s touch shocked her back to clarity, and she glared at him with no thought to hiding or conserving her fire. She didn’t have the strength for patience or willed softness. It didn’t matter; her defiance was all the power she had left. Rani would come… or not, and there was nothing Furiosa could do one way or the other. This was the plan. She was doing her part. There was no need to chase prey that could be lured willingly into range, and Furiosa was being a good lure – of this she was certain, her pain and terror only serving to better disguise the trap. 

She thought of Shannian on the fishing platform and of how her screams ripples through her body. She thought of Yael, not Valkyrie’s birth mother but the first of the name, the first fisher women with no platform, no sisters hiding in the hills, only the tent spike in her shaking hand. But first the king needed to be subdued, to lulled into sleep, and in this way Furiosa’s job was easier; she only had to wait and count as she had done so many nights before.

Somehow now that task seemed nearly impossible. Every other time when she could have lashed out, snarled and spat and struck, she found herself locked inside her skin. Now that she was trapped and injured she squirmed instinctively like a small animal. Joe’s touches and whispers meant to be gentle and calming as if he’d somehow forgotten being the one who struck her, and all she wanted was to swat him away and flee from them into the depths of herself, where she couldn’t feel him or the stabbing pain of breathing. 

Rani would come, Rani with the shard of glass as long as her hand, Rani with the taunt, brown limbs, Rani who killed many kangaroos to feed her family… and many men. How many women would Joe feed? 

She screamed at his weight on her chest and swung her legs and good arm as if she were a beetle stuck on its back. The pains in her chest and her shoulder, her belly, and now her groin merged, as if the gap that has been torn in her was growing as it gnawed at her. Eventually it would suck her into it and swallow her whole. Her shoulder was the relentless epicentre, throbbing as she counted the passage of time and rhythmic in its taunts that she would never manage the climb down the sheet rope.

Joe howled then, jolting Furiosa back to reality in time to see a pair of lean, brown arms pulling him back as he reared like a horse in a story. Rani’s hands clamoured up him to reach his throat, and then the already bloody glass shard slipped into the dip between his neck and clavicles. He gurgled, spitting blood as he caved forward. He snapped only close enough to awareness to catch himself before he landed on Furiosa. She met his gaze as she forced herself to roll out of his way, and then he crashed onto the bed, eyes glazed. 

Furiosa stared as she touched his slack cheek. Was she dreaming? She dipped her fingertip in his flowing blood and then studied its slickness against her skin. Satisfied, she slammed her right fist into his noes. Joe stirred but didn’t wake, and Furiosa’s chest swelled with joy that she finally could make him suffer at her hand. She struck again, this time dropping all her weight onto the heel of her palm and Joe’s exposed temple.

“Durable. Durable!” Rani had been hissing, but Furiosa hadn’t noticed. 

Only the sharp pains in her chest and shoulder snatched her focus back from the still living Immortan crumpled and broken before her. “He’s not dead,” Furiosa protested, but her body wouldn’t let her continue.

“Not yet. Don’t worry about him.”

“The Organic is coming,” Furiosa sputtered as she rose to her feet. “Is everything ready?”

“Mm-hmm. June is setting the knots.”

Furiosa groaned as she tried to roll her shoulder. “I need your help.” She closed her eyes as her palm at the same time, and she tried to lift her arm in a feeble pantomime of climbing. She could manage only tiny and torturous movements before her muscles spasmed, and she cried out “Put my shoulder…” she swallowed, panting as she spoke, “back in its socket.”

“I… Durable, I don’t know how.”

“I’ll talk you through…” but panic swelled in her throat as she met Rani’s eyes. “Otherwise, I can’t…” She closed her palm again, tried to force a grip from her protesting muscles. “We’ll go downstairs… get a book… something heavy… it’s not hard.” But Rani just shook her head. “We have to try!” 

“There’s no time.” Rani’s words were sharp and final. “Organic is coming, right?” She made for the door.

“He’ll be distracted by working on you. He won’t notice that June and I are gone. I’ll come back for you.”

“You won’t.” Furiosa stared in nauseated disbelief.

“I promise.”

“You’ll leave me to catch the fall.” Furiosa followed her now. Brisk steps brought her close enough to Rani to whisper bitterly in her ear, “After I was the bait…” Furiosa’s next inhale brought a fitting, stabbing pain to her chest. 

“I’m sorry Durable.”

“Sorry?” If Furiosa had strength to spare she would have shoved Rani down the stairs then, but she was running on adrenaline, and the ground had never seemed further away.

“What could I do?” Rani’s voice broke with desperation. 

“Just try.”

“And risk missing… Even if I could put it back, it’ll be useless for days.”

Furiosa burst past her. She was crying freely now, “Miss Giddy will help me.”

“She won’t. She can’t. He…”

A shriek of terror cut through the still air of the Vault, and Rani bolted for Snow’s hole in the Dome. Furiosa trailed, half stumbling, behind. She stopped when she saw the shredded cloth swaying in the breeze, taunting. Rani was leaning out, the jagged edges of the broken glass scratching her skin through her thin, pale wifecloth. Rani jerked herself back into the Vault, her hand pressed to her mouth as she bit her own fingers.

That’s when the Vault door opened. Desmo burst in and ran straight for Furiosa. She only managed a few steps before his arms were around her, so close she could smell the talc on his skin. He held her back as she tried to break for the tantalisingly open door. She thrashed against his arms, grunting and growling with all her might and shrieking at the pain of his grip on her shoulder. But he was strong, and she was weak, and he held her fast.

“She’ll be right. You’ll be right. No one is going to hurt you,” he lied as he stroked her hair. 

Otto and the Organic followed. “What’s all this then?” asked the Organic as he approached Desmo and Furiosa.

“This one’s gone hysteric,” Desmo explained between cooes that only fanned Furiosa’s anger until she wanted to tear him apart with her teeth. 

Otto restrained Rani while the Organic looked over the mess of blood on Furiosa’s shirt. “Where’s The Immortan?” He spoke slowly and proudly like he’d just solved a puzzle.

“There is no _Immortan_!” Rani declared before thrusting her elbow backwards into Otto’s already damaged nose. 

Furiosa’s eyes narrowed as if bringing her situation into clearer focus. The Immortan was gravely wounded, not dead but hardly alive. June was likely little more than a puddle at the base of the tower, her rope torn to shreds. And there was Rani, all fire and vitriol and probably seconds from using the glass shard still tucked within her clothing. She would slit all their throats and make a run for it; Furiosa knew her desperation all too well. Could they take three grown men between the two of them? Not with Furiosa’s arm danglingly from its socket and a crack in her ribs. 

So Furiosa gathered up all the air her damaged chest could hold and wailed, “She attacked him!” She didn’t need conjure tears; they were already flowing and mixing with the blood on her face. “Snuck up from behind.” She met the Organic Mechanic’s gaze. “Upstairs.”

He ran as fast as she’d ever seen, leaving the two Boys behind to manage the Wives. 

Otto scoffed, “Bet she helped. This one’s got some feral in her.”

“That’s not feral; that’s woman,” Rani hissed.

“Before you broke her,” Desmo reminded him.

Furiosa’s breath caught in her throat. She sputtered and panted as she shook with violent chills as if she’d just succumb to a sudden fever. Her World was spinning. Snow was dead. June was dead. Rani was practically dead too, and Furiosa was no closer to the outside than when any of this had started. Whether from the pains in her body or betrayal sour in her mouth, she felt sick. 

“I need air,” Furiosa creaked to Desmo as she swayed in his arms.

He coddled her as he walked. “Don’t worry. The Immortan is fine, and we’ll get you fixed up and this hole here patched, and…” He held her gently as he led her further into the Vault, eventually stopping beneath an air duct in her bedroom. 

He helped her to her knees so she could tip her chin back and gulp at the air like a fish on the land. _That’s not feral; that’s woman._ Rani’s words rang in her ears as she choked on her own stuck response. She gagged and heaved over the plumbing trough, but nothing came out. She slumped forward feeling rough, raw, and empty inside.

Desmo held her chest together with well meaning hands as he whispered to her, “Oh Furiosa. If only you could understand.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Joe beats Furiosa as punishment for failing to stop Snow from jumping. Otto also injures her, dislocating her shoulder, and is sent to fetch the Organic Mechanic for her. Desmo is sent to wait outside while Joe rapes her. Rani comes as promised and attacks Joe. She and Furiosa leave him alive but unconscious. Furiosa realises that she will not be able to climb down the rope made of bed sheets to the next floor unless Rani helps her put her arm back in its socket. Rani refuses, saying that she doesn’t know how, and they don’t have time. While they are arguing, the rope tears, and June falls, presumably to her death. Desmo hears June’s screams, and comes back into the Vault at the same time as Otto returns with the Organic Mechanic. Furiosa, knowing that she is trapped, tells them how Rani attacked Joe. Rani reacts with pride, and Otto accuses Furiosa of helping her. Desmo reminds them that she was injured before the two War Boys left her alone with Joe. Furiosa panics at having betrayed Rani, and Desmo comforts her, calling her by her real name and implying that he knows her true role in Joe’s attack.


	24. The 731st Day

_And then in shadows she waited_  
_Becoming little more than darkness herself_  
_For wrong times and wrong places_  
_Make mistakes of every choice, necessities of error._  
_Only the wisest of the sages know but seldom speak:_  
_Habit makes the world go round._  


### The 731s Day

“What happens now?” asked Promise, her face pressed to the cracked glass beside the fresh patch.

Miss Giddy looked up from the blackboard in her lap and the shaky writing: _June, Snow, Promise,_ and a line of other names Furiosa didn’t recognise. “Rani must still have a use… even though our Immortan has deemed her unsuitable to be a Wife.” She sighed as she added _Rani_ to her list. “So she is now a reward for his most brave and loyal warriors.” Then she wheeled herself back from the glass as smoothly as a breeze. 

Furiosa joined Promise at the Dome. There was Rani on the ground, or at least what remained of her. She seemed shorter, and Furiosa was trying to figure out how she was seated until she realised that Rani wasn’t; she was standing in a hole so that the ground came up to her thighs. She stood with her arms folded across her chest and her chin low so her thin forearms and biceps cupped her face. Her eyes were closed. She swayed ever so slightly as she waited. 

Around her seven Boys took positions, six in a circle around her and one beside. That centre Boy spoke to the others, giving them some sort of directions Furiosa couldn’t make out. Then he held his fingers in the air to mark a countdown, and when he dropped them, the other Boys charged at each other. 

“It’s called the Bitch Pit,” Miss Giddy said over her shoulder, her voice weak but still sharp, as though her fire had been turned to smouldering ash for transport, “because the only use for a woman is service to men. We are treasures, prizes, resources, rubbish… never human beings to these people.” She shook her head. “No need to give this the validation of any more of our attention.” 

Promise lingered a moment longer, her lips parted enough that her breath fogged the glass. Then she gasped and hid her face in horror when one Boy gave another a particularly brutal boot to the jaw. She hugged herself before following Miss Giddy back to the old classroom set-up with its smeared blackboard and empty chairs. 

“Do you want me to read for you?” Promise asked as passed Giddy on her way to her usual chair.

Go right ahead,” said Giddy, passing her the book with her bony fingers marking the page. 

Promise didn’t sit; she stood behind her chair and balanced the open book on its back.

> “'Hope' is the thing with feathers—  
>  That perches in the soul—  
>  And sings the tune without the words—  
>  And never stops—at all—

But Furiosa stayed behind to watch the fighting below. She figured she owed at least this much to Rani. Furiosa’s watching wouldn’t change a thing, but someone should. She knew what she would see would be terrible, that it would carve itself into her skull behind her eyes to haunt her when she tried to sleep. That would have been nothing new for her. Furiosa hardly thought of herself as getting off easy, but the pure and simple truth was that she had betrayed Rani and therefore deserved every bit of her suffering. 

Furiosa had thought the Boys would kill Rani outright, that she would be executed and shredded like a common wretch. She was taken and brutalised to be sure, punished worse than Furiosa had been, but then she was let to heal. Miss Giddy said she was probably kept somewhere deep in the Citadel bowels, somewhere isolated where no one could help her escape. 

So Rani healed, and Miss Giddy healed, and the Immortan Joe lived up to his name. Furiosa supposed she kind of healed as well. Her ribs still ached when she breathed, and her shoulder still didn’t quite move normally through her feeble attempts at push-ups. She had no use for those anymore anyway. Her injuries happened before Rani’s and were less extensive than Joe’s or Miss Giddy’s, and they were all up, or at least about; Furiosa figured that she would never be the same. This was her new normal.

Joe had only come by once to visit since with his remaining wives June died and to give them a gift as an apology for losing his temper. It was a strangely shaped box that made noise when someone pressed its black and white tongues. He called it a _piano_ and promised that Miss Giddy could make music from it when she was well again. The breathing apparatus he had taken to wearing made his words sound unsettlingly distant, like a ghost at the end of a long, abandoned hallway. Then he left, moving feebly and slowly. It was the most pleasant visit he’d ever paid the women. 

In the few days since then, Promise would poke around on the piano, not making music exactly, just pressing one key at a time, sometime the same over and over again. She eventually found a scale, or at least most of one; a few of the keys made weak or shaky tones that never quite found their pitch, and others made no sound at all. Furiosa refused to touch the piano-box-thing; it smelled too strongly of wood and home. This was no place for music anyway.

And now was no time for it either, but Promise had started pacing as she read. Now she was stopped at the piano. She slid her hand across the keys, depressing each of them in turn, even the silent ones. They echoed off the stone walls and metal door.

“Durable,” she called between notes. “Join us.” Then she read another stanza: 

> And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—  
>  And sore must be the storm—  
>  That could abash the little Bird  
>  That kept so many warm—

  


Furiosa looked back but only for a moment. Then she went back to watching Rani, how she thrashed when first one boy and then another grabbed her about the waist then about the hair. Rani opened her mouth as if to scream and scrunched her eyes closed, but any sound that came out never passed the Dome. Then another Boy attacked the one holding her by the hair and then guarded him while the first carried her past the crowd gathered to watch the spectacle. Their cheers rose to the Dome like a rush of wind heard but unfelt.

“I think it’s over,” said Furiosa to no one in particular, and Rani’s head jerked up for an instant as if she could see Furiosa watching her if not for her sealed eyelids. 

“Let’s hope so,” said Miss Giddy.

Then Rani disappeared into the swarm of bodies. Furiosa stared at the mass of War Boys until she was certain that she could no longer pick out Rani’s ruddy and lively skin amongst all the deathly pallor. Then she reluctantly joined Promise and Miss Giddy for the last stanza of the poem.

> I've heard it in the chillest land—  
>  And on the strangest Sea—  
>  Yet, never, in Extremity,  
>  It asked a crumb—of Me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This poem comes to us from Emily Dickinson.


	25. Interlude

### Ten Years Earlier

"Psst, Mum, over here," whispered Hope from across the sandy room. She peered out from behind a cabinet in the corner where the miniature sand dune dipped. 

As Jennifer Gideon trudged over she marvelled out how the blue paint on the walls could just as well have been open sky. The colour was an almost perfect shade of blue, even a bit lighter towards the top of the wall where the sun exposure had faded it. The room certainly felt open enough to be the outside, and she knew that she and her daughter were far from the first looters even if the sand had erased all earlier tracks. She crouched as her daughter handed her a book from the cabinet. 

"Do we have this one yet?" Hope asked, making no effort to contain her childish excitement, and why should she? Hope had known no other life beside scavenging books, but it was the kind of treasure hunting existence Jenny could have only dreamt of as a child. 

Jenny blew the dusty coating from the book's leather cover. It's gilt lettering glimmered in the early evening light. "What do you think? Can you read it?"

"The koh-lehc-tehd works of...Perky..." she fumbled with the author, but Jenny couldn't have been prouder. 

"It's poetry." She opened the book carefully. It was ancient, probably a hundred years old - its pages brittle beneath her touch. 

She knew they couldn't stay long, knew they were losing the light, but the moment was too magical to let slip away without acknowledgement. So Jenny rose to standing, and with the sand blanketing the floor her hair almost brushed the ceiling. She turned the pages solemnly until she found the poem she wanted: _I met a traveler from an antique land…_. She folded the corner of its page for later. 

"Are there any others? I think these people were our kind of people,” Jennifer mused as she tucked the book into her pack.

“Tons.” Hope dove back into the corner and resumed digging out the buried bottom shelf of the bookcase. She scooped up sand by the handful. “What about this one?” She tugged at a tall, thin book poking out by a few centimetres. It’s cover was slick and glossy. 

“Give her a go,” Jennifer said, “but then we should go.” The shadows cast by the dunes were growing. “Make it our last of the day.”

Hope nodded, her red hair practically glowing in the dusk light. “Let’s just take it then. No such thing as too many books, right?” She didn’t look up for Jennifer’s agreement. She just dug out the rest of the sand around the book until she could free it. “Let’s go.”

Jennifer shoved the book in her bag with the others and took out her headlamp. She shouldn’t need it, but she wanted to be ready just in case they weren’t safely in the car by the time darkness fell. _Safely?_. There was no such thing as safe anymore, but there was at least gas and bullets and the Citadel. 

The rumble of an engine caught her attention. Normally Zack wouldn’t waste the fuel keeping the car running while he waits for his wife and daughter to finish up. Normally he would wait somewhere secluded, the chrome of their old station wagon kept covered so it’s glare wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye. The car had been nothing special a few years before, a barely functional rubbish pile Zack kept together with duct tape and love. Now it was unimaginable wealth. 

So Jennifer grabbed Hope by the hand led her out the maze of sand filled rooms they’d navigated to find the bookshelf. They hardly notice the turned over picture frames, the closet doors left ajar. Most everything else was buried except for a few glimmering figures standing atop plastic pillars and stone bases on some of the higher shelves. Jennifer recognised them as tacky trophies, some family’s shrine to their child’s now useless achievements in varies activities, but Hope had spent most of her youth in the world, so she saw those objects as they truly were. She took one in each hand, holding them by their pillars.

Hope cut ahead of Jennifer and peered our the front window of the house. “We have a clear shot to the car.” Then she moved to the front door and held her trophies up defensively as she crept out, keeping her mother close at her back. “Looks like bikes coming from the east,” she said as she regarded the shape of an incoming dust cloud. Her eyes glimmered with excitement.

“I see them.” Jennifer gages the distance to Zack’s parking spot where the sand was shallower. “You’re right, it’s a clear shot if we hurry.”

“Now!” Hope shot out ahead.

Jennifer followed, but her daughter was quicker, as light and spry as Atlanta herself. Hope already had the door open for her by the time Jennifer reached the car. She chucked her bag in first and then stumbled in after. Hope slammed the door behind.

“Find anything good?” asked Zack as he shifted gears.

Jennifer nodded. “We should come back another day.” She paused, momentarily struck by gratitude that Zack humoured her passion for literature like this. He was risking her life for pretty words on yellowed papers he would never get to burn. “Do you think we can drive around them?” Jennifer asked about the still oncoming biker gang. Zack knew as well as she did that books were what stood between savagery and all the world.

“Nah, we’ll have to fang through them.” He shifted again as they gained speed. “Ready Hope?”

“You bet,” the girl said as she dove for the small shotgun Zack kept beneath the passenger side dashboard. 

Jennifer narrowed her eyes. “You sure you know how to use that thing?” 

Hope stuck out her tongue. “Better than you.” She rolled down the cracked window. “Dad taught me.”

Jennifer looked to Zack uncomfortably. She knew her husband was a good shot and a good teacher. She knew her daughter was smart and fit and all the things she would need to be to survive and even thrive in their new age, but she wished things could be different. 

“Watch the kick,” Zack cautioned. 

“I know. It’s just bird shot,” Hope said as if she knew the difference.

The sight of her daughter with a weapon held at the ready against her shoulder made Jennifer feel sick to her stomach, but she held her tongue. Her own squeamishness had no place in this world. Still she prepared to plug her ears and bury her head like a child. Her own daughter at almost thirteen was so much stronger and braver than she ever had been. 

She’d seen what guns could do back when most people did not. All the books in the world back when the world was full of them hadn’t been enough to save humanity from itself then, and she didn’t know why she should think anything should be any different now. Sometimes she wondered why she tried. What was she really looking for every time she drug her family out to these abandoned houses?

At least Hope didn’t have to fire that day. She seemed almost disappointed when the biker gang and the station wagon passed each other as civilly as if it had been the old days. She sat with the weapon in her lap, still hesitant to put it away away as the dust cloud from the biker gang disappeared into the sunset behind them. 

“You’ll get your chance,” Zack said. “Don’t you worry about that.” Then he looked over his shoulder at Jennifer. “She wanted to learn.” He looked back at the road. “Who was I to say no?”

“I understand,” Jennifer sighed, breathing the tension from her body. Then she pulled her prize find of the day from her bag and flicked on her headlamp. “Someday I’ll let you teach me; I’m just not ready yet.” 

The night surrounded Jennifer, clinging to her skin as she wondered if she really could pull a trigger and kill a human. She told herself she could if she needed to, that if it meant saving Hope she would do it in an instant. she started to read:

> I met a traveller from an antique land,  
>  Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone  
>  Stand in the desert. . . . 

She turned off her light, not really needing it. She knew most of these words by heart. She just needed to dust them off.

> Near them, on the sand,  
>  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,  
>  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,  
>  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read  
>  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,  
>  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;  
>  And on the pedestal, these words appear:  
>  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; 

Jennifer Gideon who would one day be called Giddy whispered of a fallen king and a broken world as she ran her thumb and fingertips over her roughened palm and watched the sand dunes turn to flat expanses of dust first blue and then black in the darkness.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” she said aloud and clear as starlight, just as the Citadel started to come into view, its bulk dark against the night sky.

> Nothing beside remains. Round the decay  
>  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare  
>  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem is, “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.


	26. The Days of the Reaping Mother

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for abortion, miscarriage, and other pregnancy-related medical issues. Summary in notes.
> 
> It looks like I forgot hit hit “post” after I uploaded chapter 25. Oops. Fixed! Please note that this is now a two chapter update. 25 is Miss Giddy backstory. If you missed that and are interested, it is now posted.

### Three years earlier

K.T. took Furiosa back to the vineyards for her training one more time. Although it was about the same time of year, this spring was hot and dry, and the vines were already decorated with green grapes hanging in triangular bunches. The fruit were small and hard but round and bright, beautiful in their way.

"Do you remember when we came here before, and I told you how grapes turnout best when the seasons are difficult?"

Furiosa nodded, and K.T. took a bunch in her hand. She let it dangle as she weighed it in her palm. Then, without a word, she took a small knife from her belt and cut the young fruit from the vine. It fell to the dusty ground; K.T's arms were already firmly folded over her belly by the time it landed. "It's called a green harvest, when you take some of the fruit early and let it rot so the other bunches can grow fatter and stronger without competition. There are..." She paused, mauling over the right words as her hand subconsciously drifted towards the baby growing within her, "only so many resources to go around." 

The vineyards alone were thriving. All the others crops were withering. The leftovers from harvest were running low; the sweet potato crop had already been exhausted, and the camels' milk was running dry. The snails were already starting to aestivate, so they ones still awake were harvested before they could save themselves for the next year. The Vuvalini ate what they could and stored what could be stored, but still the hot summer loomed before them and blew hot breath that sucked the moisture from their skin. The Mens Tribe even left early for their summer wanderings as to put less strain on the food supply.

“Are they good to eat?” Furiosa asked as she bent to retrieve the young grapes.  
“No…” K.T. looked pale, and Furiosa wondered if she was feeling babysick. “But they want go to waste.” She swallowed and found her bearings. “Some will go medical uses. You remember your tinctures and tonics class?”

Furiosa nodded. That felt like ages ago, before she was even initiated. 

“Most will go back to the earth where they land so the grapes still on the vine can keep growing. These fruit just picked the wrong time to start growing. We have to weigh the needs of the vine against the needs of the fruit.”

That afternoon, Furiosa and her mothers were pouring bricks for repairs to their house when Grandmother Fang her. The old woman looked even older than usual: worn, tired, hopeless. Mary quickly offered her some tea.

"No," Grandmother Fang demurred. "You'll need it for later." She gathered herself. "I've come to speak with K.T." Her eyes fell on K.T. who solemnly stood from her work. "Do you wish privacy?"

K.T. shook her head. "This involves the whole family.”

"As you wish..." Fang's eyes passed between the three of them, surveying their faces. "As you know this coming season is likely to be difficult for us. I've counted our stores, and the numbers aren't very promising. K.T., being a woman is full of painful choices, and now the Goddess asks one of you." She looked to Furiosa and found no horror in the girl's face. "The Reaping Mother will come to our clan in three days. She will meet with you K.T. if you will meet with her. The decision is yours to make, but now that as everything stands, we won't have enough food for us."

K.T. agreed. "Malnutrition ain't no joke. There will be other years, better years." 

"But you want that baby," cautioned Mary.

"And I will want the next one too." 

So three days later K.T joined the other pregnant women, and they were led away so the Reaping Mother could return their children to the Earth and the bosom of the Resting Mother. Furiosa was made to watch because she was too old to be sheltered from the horrors of life. She and Mary followed the group into the Reaping Tent where they made a circle and drank the milk of death. 

"Blessed be the Reaping Mother," they chanted, "who does what must be done; who endures our alongside us and knows our suffering. Blessed be the Reaping Mother with her strength and wisdom. Blessed be the swift slices of her scythe and the comfort of her arms. Blessed be the speed of her feet and the purity of her tears."

Fang, draped in her white and adorned in sun-bleached bones, gathered the blood and flesh so it could be returned to the Earth. Some women sobbed; some were ill; others just sat still. Mary came as well to clasp K.T's and Mary clasped each other’s hands, and Furiosa wondered how many babies Mary had lost before her own birth.

"You were pregnant with me when you came here, right?" Furiosa asked Mary after they had returned home.

She looked to K.T. who was sprawled out on the bed, a bladder of hot water pressed to her abdomen. K.T. nodded, her eyes half closed, face drawn with exhaustion. 

Then Mary answered, "Yes, I was."

"Did you know there wouldn't be enough food?” Furiosa hugged her legs to her chest. “Did you know others would starve? If everything you told me was true, about the water running out and people turning to animals, why wasn't I reaped?"

Mary sighed. "The Reaping Mother took more than enough babies the year you were born. Plenty of mothers looked at the world and decided they bring any more people into it. I guess I could say I was selfish for keeping you, but it wasn't that simple. Your father introduced me to these women with their crazy plan to start over. I knew - we all did- that the first few years would be hard - they always are - but I knew how special this place was going to be, and I wanted you to be part of it. You brought me here, Furiosa.”

"Did you know I wouldn't be born broken from malnutrition?"

"No, I didn't. I also didn't know if there ever would be good years, at least for me. I was older than K.T is now, not by much, but by enough to make a difference. I mean, no one has any guarantees that they can become pregnant again, but my chances were slimmer than most."

K.T. propped herself up so she could look Furiosa in the eyes. "Just because your mother and I chose differently doesn’t mean one of us chose wrongly. _Right_ would be for us to get pregnant when and only when we want to and for everyone to have enough food and water, but that's just not how the world works. _Right_ is whatever you can live with."

### The 732nd through 914th Days

Other Wives came to the Vault, Wives whose names Furiosa never bothered to learn. At least there were five of them again, all fresh and fertile, and some even eager for Joe’s affections. Furiosa was more than happy to share. 

After a time Furiosa fell ill. It wasn’t too strong of a sickness, but it lingered, punching her in the gut at least once a day hard enough that she had to fight to keep whatever was in her belly. Sometimes she lost, and Miss Giddy would give her something gentle and calming to drink because she had to keep up her strength. The baby, Giddy said, would suck it all from her if she wasn’t firm in claiming it for herself. Sometimes she threw that up too and would sleep for the rest of the day. Sometimes the baby won.

Eventually her body decided to tolerate the baby’s presence instead of trying to purge it all the time. Then her belly started to swell, which Furiosa found fascinating. The thought of a little Joe growing in front of her guts still made Furiosa ill, but when she forgot it was his, when she pretended it was the child of an unseen god like in a story, she found her own increasing girth a marvel. She poured over books with detailed illustrations, and she would move her hands over her belly attempting to feel her organs shifting. 

“It’s still early,” said Miss Giddy, reading her intentions between her hands moving over her stomach and the open book before her. “This happens when you’re much bigger. Everything should be smooth sailing until then.”

Furiosa waited for that time of _smooth sailing_ , but it never came. She stopped rejecting her meals outright, but she still hurt. The Organic Mechanic came and declared that the child would live, but he said nothing for the child’s lodgings. That was fine by Furiosa; she would have been happy to disappear. She imagined the baby growing so much it swallowed her whole.

Then Joe brought a celebratory feast to his wives and ordered Miss Giddy to play the happiest song she knew on the wooden thing she called a piano. It really did make music when Miss Giddy poked its black and white tongues in the right order. Miss Giddy gave words to the notes she coaxed from the lopsided box, songs of stars and sheep and boats and other strange things. Joe would praise the girls for their singing, his Durable especially, even though Furiosa was hardly better than tone deaf. That wasn’t why she kept her voice soft and pinched. Joe just called her shy and praised her more, saying that she would sing clear as a bell once she knew the words well enough.

It wasn’t just her soul that hurt. One night the pain was so bad she couldn’t get out of bed or even reach over the side to throw up. She simply puked where she was and rolled to her back and shivered as she sweated, feeling like butter melting before a blue-hot knife. She turned her head to vomit again and found Giddy’s hand cool against her hot skin. Then the other moved to her stomach and was cool and comforting at first, but then it pressed her rigid belly and lifted, and Furiosa’s short life knew no greater pain. 

She passed out before the Organic Mechanic came for her. She embraced the darkness as it invade her vision. She dove into it. She surrendered.

She woke up in a strange place of dark, cold stone. She tried to roll over, but she found tubes and wires connecting her to the metal equipment around her. She ran her fingers over a tube running out of her arm until it passed between a network of iron bars. She closed her fingers around the bars and shook them. _A cage! Sweet Mothers!_ Strange, wild eyes looked back at her in the darkness. Her breath caught in her throat as she jerked upright just enough to spark a blaze of pain in her belly.

“Don’t scare her. She’s valuable,” the Organic Mechanic chided the person behind the bars. 

The wild eyed person snarled and then yelped as they jerked away from a rod held out by a Pup. Then they wrapped their dirty fingers around the bars of the cage and rattled it. Furiosa finally understood that she was outside. She withdrew into her self, sinking onto her cot, clinging to its padding, and waiting for the darkness around her to stop spinning.

“Even if she is hardly wife material anymore…” Organic handed off a bucket of something to a different Pup.

Furiosa didn’t know what that meant; at the moment she didn’t care. The Pup was now playing a mask over her mouth, and she tried to turn away, but she was too weak. Clean, sweet air filled her lungs where once had been the stench of this awful place. When the Pup reached for the mask she held it tightly to her face. 

“Go tell Boss his girl will live so he can find a new job for her.”

She was vaguely aware Joe raging, not at her exactly but near her, close enough anyway that she was afraid. She understood that there wasn’t a baby in her belly anymore, and she felt not exactly sad but empty. He called _worthless_ and _useless_ as he cursed the former Mechanic for missing all the ways she was misshapen inside. 

Furiosa cried in fear and shame and perhaps a little grief until a druggy haze claimed her. Then she just felt hollowed out and weak. She welcomed the druggy haze when it took her again. _Worthless,_ she repeated to herself as she surrendered to sleep.

The next time she awoke it was to poetry. 

> Stasis in darkness.  
>  Then the substanceless blue  
>  Pour of tor and distances...

She was back in the Vault, in the bed that wasn’t _hers_ , with Promise reading to her. She must have moved more than she intended because Promise stopped reading to call for Miss Giddy. Furiosa thought about asking her how many days had passed, but then she decided that the days when she never awoke were the best and therefore shouldn’t count. 

“Are you sending for the Organic?” asked Promise.

“Not yet,” Miss Giddy said. “We don’t want them taking her yet.”

Furiosa propped herself up on her elbows so she could look around. “Taking me where?” 

Furiosa heard the scraping of Miss Giddy’s walker against the floor before she saw Miss Giddy herself. Her face was tight and grave when she asked, “How much do you remember?”

“Enough,” Furiosa lied. The gaps in her memory were better off empty. 

“I’m so sorry,” Miss Giddy tried to console her.

“Don’t be.” She had done nothing wrong. “I lost a baby. It happens.” Furiosa winced as she tried to sit up further. A firm hand and a sympathetic look held her to the bed. “I still have one strike left, right?”

“Oh Furiosa,” Miss Giddy sighed looking like she might cry.

“You get what you want, what you’ve always wanted,” Promise said as she grabbed Furiosa’s hand. “You get to leave.”

“Just like that…” Furiosa marvelled.

“Rest while you can,” said Miss Giddy. “We’ll do what we can to delay it, give you the best possible chance.”

“What do you mean?” Furiosa scanned her face for answers. 

Miss Giddy straightened herself as much as she could and tightened her face. “You are barren now, Furiosa. It has been written on your back because you are worthless to him now.” The him needed no further explanation. “I begged him to take pity on you, to let you stay with us until you are strong enough to survive. After all, it’s not your fault the baby implanted itself poorly. You did everything correctly. You were the perfect wife.”

“I don’t want his pity.” Furiosa hugged herself.

“No, but I want it for you. He will give you to the War Boys as he did Rani so you might be of some use to someone. If you are lucky you will die then, but..” Miss Giddy leaned in so Furiosa could look into her eyes, the lines drawn by time looking almost as dark as those drawn by her own hand, “I don’t think you want that kind of luck either.”

Furiosa spent a moment blinking in mental silence before she shook her head. 

“So we’ll fill your mind and your belly as long as we can because you’ll need every fact and calorie you can carry.” She nodded to Promise who left the room, presumably to bring food. 

Then Miss Giddy leaned even closer. She stroked a few strands of Furiosa’s hair that had become limp and disobedient from lack of care. She hummed as she pressed the strands flat against Furiosa’s forehead and then regarded them for hardly half a breath before deeming them hopeless. She kept them their against Furiosa’s skin as she whipped out a pair of scissors from a pocket in her apron. 

“I’ll do what I can to help you get where you’re going,” Miss Giddy whispered as she drew breath. 

_Snip, snip_

Then greasy strands fell to Furiosa’s chest. “Bless the Reaping Mother who does what must be done; who endures our alongside us and knows our suffering. Blessed be the Reaping Mother with her strength and wisdom. Blessed be the swift slices of her scythe and the comfort of her arms. Blessed be the speed of her feet and the purity of her tears,” Furiosa whispered to the Goddess she had long since come to doubt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary: Furiosa remembers the time K.T. Concannon aborted a wanted pregnancy due to famine. Then Furiosa herself becomes pregnant and enjoys the benefits thereof despite strong morning sickness. However, the pregnancy fails, due to it being ectopic. While removing it Organic Mechanic discovers that Furiosa has various anatomical abnormalities and conditions making her unlikely to be able to carry to full term. She is to be cast out like Rani was, but Miss Giddy intervenes and convinces Joe to take pity on Furiosa by letting her heal first. Miss Giddy explains all this to a recovering Furiosa and promises to help her however she can while trimming her hair.
> 
> The poetry snippet is from _Ariel_ by Sylvia Plath.


	27. The 930th Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Violent fight scene ahead. Summary at bottom.

_I sing of the Goddess eternal,_  
_How she grew and grows from child to crone_  
_From the treasured orchards where she ran_  
_To shadowed halls of the dead and damned_  
_To fields of Glory and honoured feasts_  
_And back across the barren plains._  
_Demons fell before her terrible grace,_  
_Returned to dust before her glorious face._  
_All mighty lords to dust as well as she_  
_Will also kneel despairing of her works_  
_How to return green to the world?_  
_So she became the Goddess in every girl._  


### The 930th Day

The day came like any other. Furiosa tossed and turned the night before, and if sleep caught up to her at all, she didn't notice. Her eyes stung as she watched the sky lighten. 

Corpus Colossus came to the Vault that morning, and for a moment Furiosa thought he had been sent to escort her to the Pit. Instead he offered her a place as his Wife since he had no need for female fertility. She was tempted for a moment; he had never been anything but kind to her, and she couldn’t image him beating her or forcing her… But her moment of temptation faded as she slipped her feet into her old boots. They’d been tucked away in Miss Nanny’s room, hidden, waiting for the day she might wear them home.

“I was never meant to be a Wife,” she said. "Any of these other girls would suit you better.” They would have been lucky to have him, she thought, but she belonged elsewhere. 

Corpus left before another word passed between them. Furiosa stood in silence as she tried to reaquaint herself with her old boots. The leather had stiffened from disuse, and at first they felt alien where she had grown accustomed to soft slippers or the bare floor, but they knew her, and she knew them. 

Her feet weren't the only part of her that had changed. Her hands has softened as well, callouses turned back to smooth flesh. Her hair had grown dark without the sun just as her skin had grown light. Her arms, her belly, her thighs, her bum, all of her had softened as much as she had tried to keep her muscles strong and taunt. 

Furiosa tested her fitness with a set of push-ups, not that they would do much good besides ridding her of some nervous energy. This was how she would face the world beyond the Vault. She pumped her legs up and down beneath her until she ran out of breath. Then she snuck an extra length of wifecloth to hold her breasts to her chest. That at least was one way she could prepare herself.

Her hair was another. Her hands shook as she bound it into a tight knot against her skull. It was long now and as lively as her mother's; taming it was a struggle, but she managed. She dunked her head in the shallow pool beneath the Dome so the weight of the water would pull her hair straight. Then she squeezed out the excess, letting it run down her back and shoulders.

She wondered as she shivered? Was there water at home? Did the river flood this year? Was there a strong harvest? She thought about stripping down and just letting herself float in the pool while she stared up at the ancient glass, but there wasn't time.

Breakfast proved to be a less successful endeavor. Furiosa spilled more of her food than ever made it into her mouth, and that which did was ill-received. Then she let Miss Giddy and the girls hug her goodbye while she fought to keep her breakfast from coming up and her guts from running free. 

“Take care of yourself." Miss Giddy embraced her with surprising intensity. Furiosa smiled as she looked down, and Miss Giddy's gaze followed hers. "Oh, you have a smudge on your shoe,” Giddy whispered as she bent to adjust Furiosa’s boot. She grunted and grabbed at Furiosa’s shoulder as she slipped her scissors into the cuff. “Make good use of them.”

Furiosa said nothing. Her belly was hot with panic and her throat too tight for speech. Then the Imperator came to fetch her. She was on the edge of pissing herself when the Vault door closed behind them. It was fear certainly, but it was also joy and something else she couldn’t place, excitement maybe, the thrill of knowing that no matter what, her life was changing. The moment she’d dreamt of for 930 Days was here, close enough to touch, to maim, to kill. There was no turning back. She counted each of her days as she walked behind behind the Imperator, one day for each step and then repeat. 

The hole was meant to protect her; that’s what the Imperator said as he helped her into it. If she stayed in the hole until a winner was clear, she wouldn’t get damaged in the scuffle. Furiosa accepted his arm and graciously promised she would crouch if the fighting moved overhead. Then the Imperator walked away, leaving her to turn to her secret treasures for comfort: her dried out peach stone wrapped against her chest and the scissors tucked inside her boot. She located them by touch, her gaze fixed straight ahead at the legs assembling before her.

Six War Boys took position in a circle around her, one from each of the Citadel companies and one each from Gastown and the Bullet Farm as well for diplomatic relations. Their friends clapped each other on the back and shouted words of encouragement: “You’ll win easily; you’ll do us proud. You’ll fuck historic,” before retreating to form a circle around them. 

The competing Boys were supposed to fight each other until a winner was determined. That Boy was then to lift Furiosa from her hole and over his shoulder to carry her to whatever new life he saw fit for her, most likely the breeding pins of his company. Once he passed into the crowd, no one was to touch him; she would be his prize then, fairly won. Rani’s Bitch Pit battle didn’t go like that, and Furiosa didn’t think hers would either; she was counting on that. 

Her fingers twitched as she imagined drawing the scissors as she had practiced, but she needed to wait. One of the Boys needed to claim her, and as he ran, she would wriggle until he dropped her. Then she would draw the scissors and run away forever, cutting down anyone who got between her and her freedom.

Her breakfast sat like a rock in her belly. Her guts were soup. She thought she might pass out from pure panic when the Imperator said his opening words, but Furiosa stroked her peach stone with slow, deliberate movements, ordering her fingers to fight against the hold fear had over them. Then she pounded her fist into her thigh until her knuckle sent a bloom of pain spreading through her flesh. 

The first Boy to attack was somehow both short and gangly at once. He swung his long arms at another Boy, sending his target jumping out of the way of his wild haymaker. A third Boy, this one from Gastown and powdered ochre-yellow, then tackled the first, sending a shoulder hard into his abdomen. The gangly Boy groaned through gritted teeth, probably louder and longer than needed as he snaked an arm under his attacker’s chin. He grabbed his own fist and pulled up. The Gastown Boy thrashed until his eyes bulged, much to the enjoyment of the crowd.

Furiosa crouched in her hole so only her eyes and forehead were visible. She shielded them with her forearm while the other hand found her scissors inside her boot. She breathed. She counted. _One, two, three_

Before she hit _four_ hands grabbed her from behind. She couldn’t move, couldn’t respond as they lifted her. Time stretched like honey candy as her every ounce of being screamed inside herself. Even her hands felt a thousand clicks away. 

The Boy started running, shoving her along with his arm around her waist and his hand on her mouth. 

_No!_. Furiosa would _not_ be taken again. 

She bit down. Hard. Talc filled her mouth and ground between her teeth. He let go, and she stumbled forward. She hit the ground, but there she found her wits and with them the knife inside her boot. 

She twisted herself as she crouched, opening the scissors and swiping with the blade behind her. The Boy jumped back, blood trickling from his calf. Furiosa lunged, this time closing the scissors and stabbing them into the Boy’s foot. 

“Witness,” someone murmured. Others repeated the word in agreement.

Furiosa was too full of adrenalin to notice. She panted as she pulled her scissors from between the Boy’s bones. She crouched there, ready to lunge again, eyes darting as she scanned for an exit. The crowd of spectators swayed, white bodies pressing closer and jostling for the best view. 

Two Boys closed in on her, one with filed teeth in front and the Bullet Farm Boy at her side. The one in front grabbed her wrist, and her first instinct was to pull away. She could have slipped out of his grip easily, but then there would still be the Boy at her side. He lunged at her. 

Furiosa stepped back instinctively, swinging the other Boy into his path. They collided, their paint mixing in the air and on their skin. Furiosa squeezed her eyes shut to keep out the dust and powder. The Boy with the filed teeth released her so he could focus on fighting the Bullet Farm Boy, but Furiosa wasn’t finished with him. She snaked her arm through his, cranking it behind him as she torqued his chest and shoulder. Furiosa walked forward, steering the Boy like a cart. 

She only made it a few steps before a hand found the knot of hair at the back of her head. It pulled, sending her stumbling backwards and breaking her hold on the Boy with the filed teeth. She snarled with frustration as she swung her arms, slashing with her scissors at everything in their range. The Boy held firm to her hair and started running. Furiosa tried to match his pace, but she lost her footing. He dragged her behind him as he raced for the boundary of the circle. 

She panted as she stumbled along, her head spinning, her chest burning. If she could only catch a bit of his flesh… if she could only land a cut… She drove the scissor towards the knot of hair. She snarled and growled as she hacked through everything the blades met. She didn’t care when she nicked her own scalp; she drew strength from the hope that the rivulets of blood where from her marring the horrible skull on the back of her neck. 

Then the Boy yelled as he pulled his hand back; she must have caught him between her blades. She lurked forward, hair falling from her half-shorn bun. The Boy howled as he came after her swinging his fists. His strikes were wide, careless. She waited until he took one especially enthusiastic swing, and then, while he struggled to right himself after over-committing, she stepped in. In a single, furious motion, she plunged her closed blade under his sternum. 

He caved forward as the air left his lungs. And then, as he gasped to replace it, Furiosa finally looked him in the face. Otto, the realisation came as she stepped forward for a second stab. Her blades slid into his flesh no less easily than before. Reaper, did she owe him anything?

Yes, she decided as she aimed her third strike. “Witness!” She punctured his trachea, and he fell.

The crowd echoed the blessing with their howls and cheers and Furiosa fanged for their border. Other Boys reached for her, but their efforts were different now. One even knocked her down and received her angry boot to his gut with a smile and an almost awed declaration of, “Chrome.”

Exhausted, Furiosa fought her way back to her feet. The ring of the crowd was within reach, but the War Boys were densely packed and pressing closer. Her heart pounded, but her spirit rose like the heat radiating from her chest. She met their eyes, shifting her gaze from Boy to Boy, turning to look at even the bloody ones left broken in her wake. 

Somewhere between her gasps and wheezes Furiosa found the breath to shout, “I am one of the Vuvalini, and I fight for myself!” Her words came out sounding shrill and desperate to her ears, but the crowd parted for her. 

She fanged through them and kept running, stirring up a cloud of dust with every step. She passed the painted Boys and the shrivelled Wretched and everyone in between. She only stopped to hack up her breakfast into the dust. Then she ran again until she could run no more. Furiosa smiled as she collapsed beneath the mid-day sun, the desert welcoming her as she fell; she was free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary: On the day Furiosa is to be gifted to the War Boys via the Bitch Pit, Corpus offers to keep her as his own wife. She declines because she knows that if she accepts she will never have another chance to get away. Miss Giddy sneaks her a pair of scissors which Furiosa uses to fight of the Boys who try to claim her. One of them is Otto, aka Reaper, whom she kills. The crowd of War Boys is so impressed by her fighting that they do not chase after her once she has fairly crossed out of the battle circle. Then Furiosa runs off into the desert.
> 
> Witness me. I finished a thing. I’ll may add another chapter later as an appendix for worldbuilding stuff, but this is the end of plot for Part II. Stay tuned for Part III in which Furiosa wonders the wasteland and lives as one of the Wretched. Plus more Vuvalini flashbacks.  
> Bonus: what ever happened to Rani?


End file.
